This article has been written by Bob Spence of C4DI and Kasia Lanucha of SpeakCulture. This is part of a series of articles that will be edited into a comprehensive ePublication for release later in 2021. Each article is designed to support CEE business succeed in the English-speaking western economies and is aimed especially to those CEE businesses that are focusing on making UK sales.
Kasia: We will be discussing sales methodology and the potential impact of culture on a sales process from a CEE to Western perspective. There will be reference to the culture models of Geert Hofstede known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural thinking and we will share a new SaaS sales model referred to as: ‘20/20 vision’.
‘20/20 vision’ is specifically designed to develop successful CEE-to-Anglo sales meetings
Has this ever happened to you?
'You held an initial sales meeting with a senior person in a British company'.
Bob: Without doubt, you know that your price point was competitive, your offer was fit for their purpose, your track record was consistent with the needs discussed and your terms and conditions were a commercial match for the requirement …yet...you failed to win the business and you probably don’t quite know why. We speculate you are:
Experienced in sales
Well trained by your company
Skilled in the professional use of the English language and idiom
Conversant with US material on developing relationships and closing sales
Your company in the CEE region may also have hired sales training from a local source to support and develop your selling skill set. So, it has to be cultural differences. It can only be cultural differences that stopped your success.
Introduction to our thinking.
Kasia: We conducted an exhaustive review of probably the most accepted and recognised sales models including:
SPIN selling
N.E.A.T. selling
Conceptual selling
SNAP selling
The Challenger sale
The Sandler System
Customer centric selling
MEDDIC
Solution selling
Bob: Based on our review we remain unconvinced that it always HAS TO BE cultural differences that are the barrier.
We worked together on starting our examination of this by looking at the different sales models that have been developed over the last 70 years. Here is the apocryphal tale regarding the young girl in the kitchen helping her mother…
The mother was preparing a pot roast for the family’s meal. Her daughter helped. As she was preparing to put the pot roast in the oven, the mother explained; ‘Now we cut the ends off each side of the meat to improve the taste’. The daughter asked: ‘How does that help’? The mother thought for a moment and replied; ‘That’s how your grandmother did it and that’s how I do it’. Not sure with this answer, the daughter called her grandmother. ‘Grandmother, why did you cut the ends off the pot roast to improve the taste’? Her grandmother thought for a moment and said; ‘Because that’s the way it’s done. That’s how my mom did it and that’s how I do it’. Still not satisfied, the daughter called her great grandmother now living in a nursing home; ‘Great grandmother why did you cut the ends off the pot roast’? Her great grandmother said; ‘When I was a young mother, we had a very small oven. The pot roast wouldn’t fit in the oven if I didn’t cut the ends off’.
Tech sales take out:
Kasia: CEE professionals looking to engage with English speaking western markets must question the use of ‘western’ sales methods. As an innovative selling SaaS professional, you need to get to the root cause of:
‘Why are we using that sales approach’?
My impression is that after reflecting on these methods with Bob, without sanity checking the source of the sales method, you may be using the wrong approach regardless of culture.
Lanucha & Spence © 2021