In the context of accelerating globalization and integration trends in the world economic system, countries must make efforts to form their advantageous positions in the international division of labour. This can be realized by optimizing the sphere of foreign economic activity of the state. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the areas of improvement of strategic tools to develop the country's export potential. The authors analyzed the theoretical and methodological basis, namely the essence of the country's export potential, its structural elements of the export potential. The authors analyzed the structure of exports of Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in 2020, highlighted their common features, shortcomings and explained why the specialization of exports is not optimal. The authors found that a systematic approach to developing a country's development strategy requires a specific sequence in the implementation of this process and proposed an algorithm for implementing the concept of developing the country's export potential, and also proposed calculating a comprehensive indicator of export potential, a more detailed description of which will be presented in further studies.