Why Indian firms go wrong when hiring US sales teams

(Reproduced version of my article in Hindu)

Cross-cultural issues make hiring a tricky proposition.

For Indian organisations aspiring to sell their products and services in the US, one of the most competitive markets in the world, the first big step is to hire seasoned sales professionals locally. The bad news is that six out of 10 such hires seem to go terribly wrong. These mistakes are extremely expensive and set organisations back by millions of dollars and many valuable years and even threaten their global ambitions. So what can Indian organisations learn from these huge mistakes?

In my mind, culture is a good place to start though there is a lot beyond culture that we must pay attention to.

Assertiveness and modesty

In the book Cultures and Organisations - Software of the Mind by Geert Hofstede and Gert Jan Hofstede, the distinction they draw between American and Dutch employers and job applicants has interesting lessons for us in India.

According to their research, “American job applicants, to Dutch eyes, oversell themselves. Their CVs are worded in superlatives, to demonstrate their outstanding qualities. During the interview they try to behave assertively, promising things they are unlikely to realise — like learning the local language in a few months.”

“Dutch applicants, in American eyes, undersell themselves. They usually write modest, short CVs. They are careful not to be seen as braggarts and not to make promises they are not absolutely sure they can fulfil. American interviewers know how to interpret American CVs and they tend to discount the information provided. Dutch interviewers, who are accustomed to Dutch applicants, tend to upgrade the information.”

The Hofstedes thus explain that when the applicant comes from a culture where being assertive is encouraged and the employer comes from a culture where being modest is encouraged, the potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding is high.

In their article, ‘Culture and the Self — Implications for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation’, Hazel Rose Markus of the University of Michigan and Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Oregon, point out that western culture promotes the need to be independent, private, unique, express oneself, promote one’s own goals, be assertive and so on. In contrast, they see that for people in the East the concept of self is all about being connected to the social context, being flexible, fitting in, occupying one’s proper place, promoting others’ goals, adjusting oneself to others, having restraint and being indirect.

Read together, these two pieces of research confirm that one of the primary reasons for our failure is to do with the cultural orientation towards self-worth, assertiveness and modesty. It has been my personal experience that many Americans communicate articulately, present themselves assertively and share their opinions in a manner that gives the Indian interviewer the mistaken impression that the American is senior, competent, has an expansive business sense and will therefore deliver. On the other hand, given Indian interviewers’ modesty, we seldom challenge, confront or dig deeper to understand or verify the facts.

Setting expectations

Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and author, did pioneering work on intercultural communication and used context as an important means of understanding cultural differences.

Hall looks at context as being either ‘high’ or ‘low’ and maintains that in a high context culture, it is important to have a contextual knowledge of that culture to understand the true meaning of what is said. On the other hand, in a low context culture, no contextual knowledge is needed.

Hall found that in a high context culture, things get done based on one’s relationships with people, whereas in a low context culture things get done by following procedures and attention to a goal.

It has been my experience that in defining the roles and goals and stating expectations with sales professionals in the US, Indian organisations tend to be somewhat indirect, global and vague. While they may, for instance, spell out the targets clearly, they may never reach agreement on the strategies to be pursued to achieve the targets.

As a result, Indian employers may expect the salesperson to understand the true strengths of their organisation and its unique value proposition and on that basis take the ownership to evangelise it to US customers, but may not clearly spell out the preferred sales process, the right target customers, provide clear product- or service-related information, clear discount policies, transparent sales commission plans, travel budgets, reporting systems, review systems and so on.

So, while Indian employers expect their American sales professionals to go beyond rigidities and think out of the box when it comes to sales tactics, they do not meet the employee’s expectation in terms of well established, formal guidelines to close the sale.

Other problems

Added to this are the usual issues such as the American employee’s lack of proper orientation to the organisation’s culture and way of working, cultural gaps that affect their ability to get support from their Indian colleagues, people practices that do not reflect local sensitivity, misplaced expectations about work-life balance and so on.

Having made a few attempts and burnt a lot of cash, many Indian organisations quickly give up and reconcile themselves to sending a “known devil from India” to get the job done. This, to my mind, is not a sustainable solution.

The true difference between being multinational and becoming global lies in our ability to recognise the diversity issues and learning to bridge them effectively by establishing a successful mechanism to attract, select and retain talent from every country in culturally appropriate ways. What is also clear is that if Indian organisations wish to do business globally, they must have a work culture that is low context, where the need for Indian contextual knowledge is minimal and everything is explicit.