Those working internationally face the daily dilemma of managing extremely complex cultural contexts – where culture is usually a mosaic of various cultures including national, corporate and even professional cultures such as IT, Finance and HR. So how does persuasion work with such cultural complexity? Are there any signposts to follow?
I’d like to draw on my own recent experience of persuading across cultures to investigate these questions. The story – well, I was aiming to sell consulting and training to a Dubai-based creative agency, marketing to a marketing organisation. It was a new region for me to work but I felt fully attuned to the fact that different persuasion strategies might be necessary to sell across cultures. I quickly found that I was relatively unprepared.
The first challenge I experienced was with trying to properly identify learning needs. Here the cultural challenge was more organisational than national. I was dealing with a small and hugely overworked company without any history of HR management and no dedicated learning and development professional. Organisational cultures like this tend to be open to ideas at one level but also resistant to deeper interventions which attempt to get to the underlying issues. I pushed, was pushed back, pushed again but got pushed back. Then it struck me. I was perhaps making assumptions about the person I was talking to. Was this guy really the decision maker? Possibly not. And if not, how far did it make sense to discuss details which might never be translated back. Did it make sense to ask for an intro to the actual decision maker? I figured it was better to work through the intermediary. I didn’t have the necessary levels of trust and credibility which he had. Maybe he even agreed with me but he had already judged what his manager wanted. Who knows? Most of the time, I have to admit, I was operating in the dark. So I began to work much more with the language and assumptions of the client and his context than I might elsewhere. Investing huge efforts in clarification didn’t seem to be that sensible.
Putting the offer together was also tricky. Which information and with how much detail was likely to be optimal in terms of persuasion? I work a lot in Germany and in my early days selling training it was always fascinating to see the requirement to document minute by minute what would happen in any proposed intervention. A total waste of time in one sense as once the event started, the schedule went out the window. But the preference for structured detail was incredible. Here in Dubai, I went for a mid-range position reckoning I could increase or decrease depending on feedback. Looked like I got it right first time as there was little kick back. The only thing I got seriously wrong was on travel. There I was proposing to fly economy to save on costs. It created serious confusion that a competent professional would consider anything else than business class. I’d had a similar surprising issue with professional marketing before in Serbia when running a seminar. I arrived fifteen minutes early on the first morning; after all, I wanted to show willing. All my Serb managers rolled in fifteen minutes late. I queried it. They hadn’t expected a senior person to be there on time – I was, apparently, too important to obey the schedule. That’s why my participants turned up when they gauged would be ‘on time’.
Interestingly, time also began to weigh heavy as weeks and even months passed in planning the actual dates. Experience warned me that I was wasting my time with this. But differences in attitudes to time are a powerful cultural differentiator. My slow might be their normal. Intuition told me to stay patient. Silence worked as a deal facilitator. I eventually got the call to deliver at the end of the year.
Curiously, as I was working with a creative design agency, the issue of marketing across cultures actually formed part of the content of our eventual seminar. It was fascinating to hear the frustrations of leading edge creatives and graphic designers frustrated to work in what for them was a conservative cultural context like the Gulf. There were constant internal battles between client relations wanting to service their end customer’s innate conservatism, and the creatives wanting to push the boundaries and service the client’s innovation potential with exiting new campaigns and concepts. Watching them argue with each other, there wasn’t that much effective persuasion going on from marketing professionals. It was simply a clash of internal cultures. However, we built up mutual understanding during the seminar, got people to listen to each other, and commit anew to working together. My job was simply to make it safe to save face during the re-commitment process. Safety also persuades, it seems.
So that did this experience of persuading across cultures teach me? Firstly, don’t necessarily trust experience. Whatever happened in the past is not necessarily a preparation for the future. Understanding that makes you observe a lot more and ask more questions. Secondly, invest energies in figuring out a few key dimension: attitudes to time, concepts of relationship, expectations around information, quality and costs, approaches to decision making, factors in determining personal and product or service credibility. Getting these right really helps. And finally, you know I spent a lot of time actually discussing culture with the people I was trying to persuade, talking about cultural stereotypes, exploring the meaning of my experiences in the region. Why? Well, firstly, you get quite insightful cultural intelligence through such conversations. But more importantly, you find out what your counterpart thinks and feels about core aspects of the planned business transaction. And having mapped the broader culture, and having profiled your business partner in this way, persuasion gets a whole lot easier.
Bob Dignen, director at York Associates, and co-author of Communication for International Business
