Marketing and Selling Services Globally

I've noticed that my deadlines for this column seem to often coincide with my company's training classes. This should probably not surprise me since I travel frequently to present our classes on the techniques of selling services to groups around the world. As I write this, my partner is speaking to a class of approximately 30 service managers from 17 different countries. When they discuss elements of the class, I can hear conversations in 8 or 9 languages. Of course, we give the class in English, but they discuss it in languages shared by groups of 3 or 4. For instance, there is a group of Spanish speaking managers. Ramon, Carlos, Salvador, and another Carlos come from Spain, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Brazil, respectively. The latter Carlos has a greater challenge because Portuguese is his native tongue, but Spanish is closer to Portuguese than English.

The pace of a mixed group like this is noticeably slower than our U.S or North American classes. We have to slow down and try to avoid American slang expressions that don't translate well. Its exciting to work with these groups, however. Besides the obvious opportunity to feast on the richness of different cultures, it is gratifying to see our techniques work in all those countries. We know this from feedback from former students who are actually using their training to sell services.

There are some surprising stories. A service manager from Russia told of issuing bullet-proof vests and sidearms to service engineers that were in constant danger of being hijacked for the parts they were transporting in their cars. Scary stuff!

International Trends

So what are we learning from this work? Quite a lot, actually. First, there are some trends to note. There is a slowly growing movement to globalization of services portfolios. Some customers want consistent services in all of their local offices and may want to negotiate their prices with one person. In fact, only a minority of customers are able to speak for all of their operations at this time, but that is changing. Some technologies, such as networking or enterprise-wide software lead the way for globalization. Once a company has deployed a network or a database to the field, they become dependent upon its use and often require global service contracts.