How do you scale a sales engine across regions and cultures?
Last week, we looked at career paths and our view on how a clear route to achieve ambitions keeps your people moving forward. But as a business grows internationally, the challenge changes. How do you get the engine you built to still stay the same in markets that work differently?!
David and I have discussed at length and our view having run multi-region orgs: fix the what, flex on the how.
Why can sales engines break when they cross borders?
Again our view, usually for one of two reasons.
The first is copy and paste. It worked in the original market so let’s take the playbook, unchanged and replicate.
Or the second is the opposite. Every region builds it’s own approach, looking at the things the region leader thinks matters. In this instance, global leadership ends up with a bigger problem, forecasts it can’t compare, sales stages that stand for different things and a language that isn’t shared across the org. This is so apparent at the big US software companies where regional setups aren’t fit for purpose in other regions
Both fail for the same reason, standards become confused with style.
What should be fixed everywhere?
One qualification standard - non-negotiable
One set of pipeline stages - non-negotiable
One evidence bar for the forecast
One set of career levels and promotion criteria
This isn’t about control, it’s about visibility. When every region applies the same system, the data means the same thing everywhere.
You can then see which market is converting, which is struggling and why. Then you have the ability to react in weeks, not discover an issue one, two quarters too late.
What should flex by region?
How customers buy. Different regions buy in different timescales and a fixed playbook won’t account for this. To understand this nuance you need people on the ground as local presence builds trust and the buyer will perceive greater commitment, which of course gives them confidence. A visit from a head office just doesn’t land the same.
So each region should have it’s own territory plan, but built by the local in-market team and that is held to the same standards as everyone else.
How do you lead it?
Inspect the same evidence everywhere. Coach to the local context/nuances.
Then bring the regional leads together to share what’s working and not. An improvement found in one market should be shared to every market - That’s Kaizen at scale: small gains, shared widely, compounding over time.
What does experience say?
I’ve led sales across regions at Teradata, Oracle and Celebrus. David at Symantec, Trustwave and Computer Associates. Plus we have worked through the same challenge with clients since.
The pattern is always the same, those who scale well don’t choose between consistency and local understanding. They insist on both.
The question worth asking
Take a deal marked in ‘commit’ in two different regions. Would both pass the evidence test?
If they would, you have one forecast. If they wouldn’t, you have two and only one of them can be real.
Next in Building the Commercial Engine: are you paying for the behaviour you actually want?
Building the Commercial Engine is a series on the parts of a commercial organisation that make sales performance sustainable, scalable, and forecastable.
Kaizen-One is a commercial transformation consultancy for B2B SaaS and technology companies, working from London and Sydney. We help leadership teams build commercial engines that hold their standards across every market they sell into. If your regions are forecasting by different rules, let’s talk. kaizen-one.co.uk
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