Culture Always Wins: Closing the Cross-Cultural Sale
Culture Always Wins: Closing the Cross-Cultural Sale:
Today's guest blogger is Dan Armstrong, Director of Research and Thought Leadership at ITSMA.
Your leads may be perfect. They may have the budget and the authority to buy. They may need what you’ve got. They may be ready to purchase. But there’s one problem: They’re on the other side of the world. And for all the talk of globalization, the potential for misunderstandings and mistrust is exponentially higher when salespeople are forced to reach across the cultural chasm.
ITSMA’s member companies see this every day. Our members execute big-ticket cross-border IT services projects. A common cross-cultural misunderstanding in these projects occurs when the service provider gives the customer only good news. “Can you do this?” asks the U.S. customer. “Of course,” answers the Indian systems integrator. The American expects pushback or at least a discussion of tradeoffs. The Indian’s assumption is that good customer service requires an unqualified yes. Unless both parties approach the interaction with greater awareness—and a willingness to surface their underlying assumptions—the relationship is bound to suffer.
Selling depends on relationships, too. The days of Glengarry Glen Ross may be over. But Americans in particular and Westerners in general, still tend to be individualistic, impatient, and competitive. They like to get a lot done in a short amount of time. They try to unearth disagreements quickly in order to resolve them and move on. They value consistency—one rule for all—over flexibility.
That’s not the case in much of the world. The kind of trusting relationship necessary to close big-ticket IT solutions sales, the kinds that ITSMA’s members seek, require a deeper connection. That kind of connection requires that salespeople stand in the shoes of their foreign prospects.
How to do this? A few suggestions:
Hat tip to Anja Langbein Park, who spoke at ITSMA’s Annual Conference in 2011 on Marketing Across Cultures: Building Relationships and Improving Performance." Click here to see a clip of her presentation.
As the Director of Research and Thought Leadership, Dan is responsible for ITSMA’s thought leadership development and research programs and will research the latest industry trends, develop new insights, and share best practices with ITSMA members via written reports, data visualization, presentations, and interactive discussions.
Dan brings a diverse and well-rounded skillset to this role. Before coming to ITMSA, Dan moderated conferences for Information Week on behalf of sponsors including IBM, Dell, HP, and Silanis. He developed thought leadership content based on surveys and qualitative research for Deloitte Growth Enterprises Services, Forbes Insights, and Ernst & Young, and did research projects on behalf of the Gates Foundation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Dan also spent seven years as a senior editor in the thought leadership practice of The Economist, where he executed surveys and research projects for major financial services, consulting, and technology companies, as well as all of the Big Four accounting firms.
Dan is a certified Financial Risk Manager™, the author of Tools of Risk Analysis, and the editor and co-author of three books published by McGraw-Hill: Derivatives Engineering, The Derivatives Engineering Workbook, and Active Bank Risk Management. He holds an MBA in finance and research methods from Columbia Business School, with additional graduate work in statistics, data mining, and geographic information systems.
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