Mar 17, 2014 By Thomas Oriol

5 Tactful Tips for Navigating International Sales

in Sales

Our sales teams are based in Dublin, Ireland and Paris, France. However, our prospects and clients are all over the world. While at some point we will need feet on the ground, reaching such a widespread audience with a relatively small team has been one of the advantages of our sales process of Inbound > Demo > Trial.

That international reach means that we spend a lot of time on the phone or in web conferences with people from multiple cultures. As a result, for some aspects of our sales process, we have noticed cultural differences to which we need to pay close attention.

1. Continue to cold call

There are countries where cold-calling someone is almost an insult, even when your lead nurturing software tells you the prospect is ready to hear from you via phone. I find it a good reason to call regardless, since it makes for a quick disqualification if your call is rejected. And if the prospect takes the call despite his cultural reservations, then you know the next step will be interesting!

2. Play nice with gate keepers

It is well known that in some cultures (Latin countries typically), people at work are more driven by considerations of “honor” than efficiency. A gate keeper with a strong sense of “honor” will be a formidable challenge. Except being as nice as possible I haven’t really found a silver bullet here. Tips are welcome.

3. Use referrals to get a call back

Granted, people don’t always call back. But in some countries they never do. Not naming names, this was my greatest professional shock when I came back to France after a few years in the US and the UK. At one point, I actually asked a prospect why after months of trying, and he told me that, “He never called people he didn’t already know.” You are left wondering how such people expand their professional circles.

Referrals are the theoretical solution to the “not calling back” problem, but the truth is they don’t always work and they can take time. We recently experimented with a combination of emails and voicemails that seems promising (we took the idea from a Data.com webinar). Letting people know by email that you are planning to call is always a good option.

4. Push the trial

Some countries with a strong, but old-school IT culture find it hard adapting to the “just do it” mindset of the SaaS trial. They will want you to go through a formal RFP process, even though installing your application, seeing what comes up, and deciding if it is worth the trouble would only take minutes.

In such situations I tend to do three things:

Reiterate how easy it is to set up the trial
Send the prospect a formal description of the (limited) technical requirements of the trial
Push for a trial involving a small subset of the prospect’s potential users

For AppExchange applications, getting the prospect to install a Salesforce sandbox can also be a good technical ice breaker.

5. Consider all-inclusive pricing

Surprisingly, this is an aspect of the sales process where I have found few differences between countries. Most prospects ask us what the list price is during the demo, and discuss that price a little once they have decided to subscribe.

It seems that most countries have assimilated the price/user/month model favored by SaaS companies. When that price is all-inclusive there is not much to argue about, except potential volume discounts. It would be interesting to hear from companies with more complex pricing models.

Overall, simply demonstrating sensitivity to your prospect’s social norms and way of working should prevent most obstacles. And if cultural differences prove too much to overcome, this is a valuable lesson learnt that must me taken into account when planning the growth of your business.