How to Anticipate Barriers and Grow International Sales

Have you experienced instances where your international sales teams are slow to embrace new initiatives? How many opportunities get missed when clients in some countries aren’t introduced to your new product – or when in-country teams are slow to embrace a new growth strategy? Can growth initiatives be executed in a way that neutralizes hesitancy and resistance in your international offices?

Fans of American movies (and baseball) undoubtedly recall the mysterious voice Ray Kinsella heard in Fenway Park. Urged to “Go the distance,” the Iowa farmer embarks with reclusive author Terence Mann to drive halfway across the continent from Boston to tiny Chisholm, Minnesota. The Field of Dreams audience sees the value both in Ray’s willingness to physically travel AND his unerring commitment to do whatever it takes to support the quest.

Such commitment to an idea – including the willingness to invest time and energy – is vital when convincing others to take action in support of your vision.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about how to overcome specific challenges when launching new advanced products. Leaders driving growth in global companies encounter additional inherent challenges when engaging international teams.

ANY new global initiative can fall victim to incomplete execution, including new product launches, segment growth initiatives, or strategy rollouts. And the challenge isn’t limited to sales teams. Other functions – and even local leadership teams – can fail to provide the commitment needed to drive change in their groups. This results in losing critical speed-to-market and stifles the local team’s confidence in their ability to navigate a new path.

Global business leaders who understand international tripping hazards can anticipate and avoid predictable obstacles to success. Cultural nuances are relevant, but are relatively specific by country. I’ll address those in a future article, for which I’ll draw upon excellent research conducted by a Dutch former colleague of mine. For the moment, I’ll focus on two universal challenges you will encounter when seeking new growth from international teams: the effects of physical distance and disparities in local market knowledge.

Distance dampens diligence

It will surprise nobody to hear that in-country teams based in the same location as a headquarters or head office tend to execute new plans more dutifully than international offices. These teams often get more attention from the executives and the global marketing teams that are based near them. They share the same primary language, have more two-way feedback, host more visits between their clients and corporate colleagues, and frequently have closer relationships with headquarter-based teams. Their proximity in time zone and convenient location positions them to act as a proxy for all in-country operations, giving them outsized influence and more confidence that their voice is heard.

By contrast, the typical leader of an in-country team – outside the ‘home country’ – feels their voice isn’t heard as much as some peers. While a few in-country leaders may be specially favored by executives, they are the exceptional few, and everybody knows who they are. The rest have a general feeling that their views play a lesser role in shaping new products or global initiatives, even as their expected OI contributions are equally anticipated.

Just as product details and sales tools may need to be translated into a local language, in-country leaders also play a gatekeeping role when they interpret details of global initiatives for local teams – explaining why a new product or plan is being promoted. This role can be problematic when the local leader isn’t convinced that the new product or plan was designed appropriately for their specific market. They can make – or break – an initiative in their country by influencing when and how it will be executed, who will drive it, and what resources will be invested.

While a leader in the ‘home country’ knows their actions are seen, a leader in another country may not have as much incentive to execute a plan with the same vigor. Distance hampers oversight, and leading indicators may be inadequate for executives to track whether an initiative is being implemented fully or not. As a result, while a local leader may dutifully salute the head of the global business unit, they may subtly undermine the initiative by:

- Adjusting the timeline to favor other objectives.

- Delegating their tasks to a deputy.

- Silently sitting on the initiative until they see it work elsewhere.

- Making only minor token efforts that offer little chance of success.

Even in command-and-control organizations, it's simply harder to track initiatives from a distance in real-time – especially when you want to impact HOW people achieve a goal. Furthermore, distance hinders relationship-building, magnifying barriers for trust and credibility in each direction.

Local knowledge is a double-edged sword

By creating in-country sales offices around the world, companies not only alleviate language and cultural barriers, but they also enable their associates to gain deeper insights about each local market. The opinions formed within local teams mostly help – but sometimes hinder – new growth initiatives.

Opinions developed by local leaders invariably result in a feeling that they have a special competitive situation. Acutely aware of their area’s unique mix of competitors, their opinions about the uniqueness of their local market can extend into product fit, price position, value proposition, relative strengths and abilities of the local team to sell or support specific products, regulatory hurdles, and which segments are most alluring in their region (including which segments are largest, most profitable, or easiest to penetrate).

Each of these market-specific opinions can vary from the company’s global view – which is generally fine if the team is achieving its goals. Where it becomes problematic is when these perspectives calcify into a view of the market that is narrower than necessary or discourages the local team from pursuing growth opportunities. For example, if a team gains familiarity and expertise with specific segments, that may create a comfort zone that taints their views of other potential target segments.

To maximize the effectiveness of local teams, global companies need to encourage feelings of ownership within those markets, while also being able to engage the teams constructively when new opportunities arise.

Bridging the distance

In-country teams tend to focus on maintaining and growing sales of their conventional products to segments they’re most comfortable with. If you want them to do something different – such as selling more advanced products or engaging different prospects – you need to be prepared to do something different, too.

Send the right person, who has done the right preparations to guide in-person discovery workshops in each country. In-country leaders know their local markets are unique, but they don’t have reliable ways to compare to their peers’ markets. Therefore, they also don’t know the extent of their similarities to other markets.

Who is the right person? Executives or business unit leaders may make periodic trips to visit in-country teams, but they should consider sending the person who’s being counted on to lead the program and produce results. Remember that the illustrious Peter Drucker insisted that a manager’s job is to prepare people to perform and give them the freedom to do so.

A skilled facilitator whose experience spans multiple markets is invaluable to unleash fresh appreciation of growth opportunities within in-country teams. Such a person comes prepared to explore and acknowledge local uniqueness while also guiding the team through a process designed to discover market realities and reveal differing views within the local team. Done well, this enables better apples-to-apples comparisons to peer markets and triggers curiosity about best practices used in other countries – opening the door for a skilled facilitator to share observations from those other countries.

NOTE: If you don’t think you have the right person on staff – or your team needs coaching – contact me.

What is the right preparation? The model the facilitator chooses to guide the in-person discovery workshop is vitally important. I recommend the Educate-Analyze-Commit Model, which provides a framework that systematically enables the local team to share and organize their collective market insights. I’ve used this model for 20 countries on 4 continents already and it requires no preparation from the local team – other than to schedule a meeting room in their office and arrange to have team members attend who are eager to share their views and experiences.

As the name of the model suggests, there is a role for educating the local team. Educational content provides value to the local team while also establishing credibility for the facilitator. Importantly, the intent of the educational material isn’t to convince a local team to choose a preordained path or result. The magic happens when they use your guidance and tools to analyze and assess their own market and – in the process – find the opportunities for themselves, along with the actions they think will achieve their goals.

Why incur travel expenses? For most businesses, travel costs are a small fraction of the upside a new growth program can achieve in a market. By choosing to spend this money, you mitigate the physical distance between your in-country teams and your headquarter people, reducing the distance-related issues mentioned above. You also demonstrate your own commitment to the initiative.

Some executives may be tempted to include this type of workshop in regional gatherings of leaders from multiple countries. Such an approach is inadequate for three reasons. First, when participants make countless comparisons of observations from their various countries, no country ends up with a clear analysis of their own market that helps them see how the initiative fits. Second, such meetings tend to be dominated by a few of the most assertive participants, making little impact on the quieter majority. And finally, deep-dive examinations of local markets uncover more insights when they involve multiple participants from each in-country team. In fact, the teams make remarkable discoveries during these workshops when they realize they have differing experiences within their own team – prompting in-depth explorations they didn’t expect, and ultimately leading to well-informed unified perspectives by the end of the workshops.

When executives make an obvious financial commitment AND send a well-prepared person whose clear priority is to help the local team, they vastly increase the local leader’s likelihood of reciprocating and committing to take action.

Final Thoughts:

Driving growth initiatives across international teams comes with predictable challenges that are nevertheless frequently overlooked. If you’re tempted to drive change simply by using executive orders or educational presentations from marketing, listen to your subconscious mind urge you to “Go the distance.”

The more you want to drive specific outcomes or specific methods in overseas operations, the more you need to find meaningful ways to engage and support those teams. Investments of time, travel expense, and energy by executives and global marketing teams will pay dividends when you seek to drive growth through your international teams.

For executives, going the distance means spending the money to send the right people to engage the in-country teams by listening and collaborating to assess the local market. Send skilled facilitators (usually marketers with experience engaging B2B sales teams) and make sure they prepare appropriately to lead productive workshops.

For marketers/facilitators, going the distance begins with thoughtful preparation to induce insightful discussion and analysis when you’re alongside in-country colleagues in their offices. Remember that the goal is not to convince the local team. The goal is to enable them to see for themselves the opportunity that’s in front of them – then help them take action to seize those opportunities alongside their existing priorities. If you watch carefully you can even witness moments where workshop participants recognize an opportunity they hadn’t seen before – which is reminiscent of another memorable scene from Field of Dreams; where Ray’s brother-in-law clearly sees what his previously closed mind couldn’t see before.

Meet the Consultant:

James A. Craig has focused on growing B2B companies throughout his career, beginning in small regional companies and startups before following a traditional MBA path into corporate marketing – where he honed his skills empowering B2B sales teams around the world with confidence-building targeting, tools, and door-opening messages. He now enjoys applying the tools and experiences he's gained from world-class companies to help small- and mid-size companies punch above their weight and methodically outgrow their peers. Learn more at www.revulet.com.