Real Business

The hard part of global business isn’t the jet lag. It isn’t language differences. It’s the way that deals get done. I learned this the hard way – the way we learn most of the lessons that we actually remember.

I was running a software company in the US and was invited to Ireland to pitch our product to some well-placed, important businesses. The opportunity had come my way via a friend and, naturally, I wanted to give it my best shot. So I fired up a great presentation, replete with Irish examples, and jumped on a plane.

 

At the time, I wasn’t totally Americanised – I still believed in the value of face-to-face meetings. We did three meetings in a day in Dublin. They went fine. Plenty of interesting questions, much bonhomie. But at the end of the day, my very patient friend turned to me and said: “You have really become American!” He used a kind tone but it was clearly not a wholehearted compliment.

Americans and Europeans sell in entirely different ways. Americans are highly strategic. They qualify every lead, they don’t make a phone call that isn’t based on strategy and they don’t get on a plane until they have a reasonable expectation of success. They push hard to close the deal (especially if it’s near the end of the quarter), and once it’s signed, they relax and start to build a relationship. In their minds, the customers have now proved themselves worthy of time and attention.

Europeans do the opposite. They nurture relationships everywhere: school friends, neighbours, professional networks. They cultivate many acquaintances – but slowly, so that they don’t just collect business cards, they collect stories. They want to understand values and goals and when they find a good match, they’ll make it.

The whole process doesn’t feel like selling, even though that may be the result. But the relationship comes first and the deal comes second. From an American perspective, more deals are signed faster. From a European perspective, relationships ensure the deals actually work. If the deal starts to fall apart, the depth of the relationship usually means it can be salvaged. In America, if the deal falls apart, it’s dead and everyone moves on.

I don’t know if anyone has done an academic study of which process generates superior long-term rewards – there may not be much in it. What matters is knowing where you are and what you are dealing with. Trying to sell in Europe without relationships is (like my trip to Dublin) a waste of time and money. Unless you’re prepared to come back, often, and dig the foundations of the deal you’re building, you may as well not come at all.

On the other hand, if you want to sell in the US, you’d better cut to the chase pretty fast. Otherwise everyone will think you’re flaky. They’ll remember Rumsfeld’s definition of Europeans – the people who didn’t get on the boat – and they will stick to their own.

However troubled the economic climate, most businesspeople will be spending a lot of time on planes. Other economies may recover faster and we want their growth while we wait for ours, and the recession has made every company more aware of the need to dilute risk by diversifying and selling into new markets.

Every country has its own way of doing business and we’ve probably all spent a lot of time and money learning what those differences are. One thing is for sure: there aren’t any shortcuts, except to ask questions and share the knowledge you have. Like learning any language, it’s all theory until you get there, but learning some vocabulary before you go never hurts.