International Sales Best Practice – Develop Friendship

Cindy King — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:00:54 +0000

Monthly Series – International Sales Best Practices

As we have seen in previous tips for international sales best practices you need to constantly pay attention to nurturing trust in cross-cultural sales. Why? Because cultural differences can be the cause of a lose of trust. And this lose of trust can be instant… and may even happen without you even realizing it. Like many similar things in life, it is always much easier to nurture the right environment than try to repair what is broken.

Building Trust In International Sales – Tip 4

Trust no one unless you have eaten much salt with him. – Cicero

International Sales Best Practice
- Develop Friendship

We have already talked about making friends… now, let’s talk about developing this friendship. In cross-cultural communication there is trust building and trust nurturing. In our everyday life, when you make a friend you expect that relationship to be fairly stable. You don’t expect to have to put an effort in nurturing that relationship to make sure it exists.

Here are five reasons why you should develop your friendships more:

Friendship requires nurturing. This is the difference with international business. A constant effort to nuture trust is wise. You just do not know which cross-cultural hurdle can pop up and jeopardize your “friendship”.

Friendship leads to trust. There are many other benefits to develop friendships in international business. The stronger the friendship the easier it is for people to really trust you.

Friendship is a strong foundation for trust. No matter what culture you are dealing with it is always easier to trust others where there is a friendship at its base.

Friendship helps you to cross cultural barriers. The path separating two international business partners from two different cultures can be a long one. Do you ever really meet together on this path? In many cases, the answer is no. A good friendship helps you to go further along this path.

Friendship means you are approachable. There is a balance to find in internatinal business. There are business practices to keep and yet when you try to improve your communication with people from different cultures, things can get more personal than usual in business. There is a balance to find in how friendly you come across too and what this means to others. But this friendliness makes you more approachable and it becomes easier to discuss everything… including business.

Developing Friendship

How you go about developing friendship in an international business environment will depend on the different cultures involved. The point I want to share in this post is that you should make the effort to develop your international business friendships beyond the initial phase, and to work at maintaining this friendship.

Your international business will thrive once you learn the skill of creating and developing the appropriate friendships with your international clients. You need cross-cultural skills to learn how to do this across cultures, but this is a skill well worth developing for your international business success.

Now it is over to you…

How do you feel about developing friendships with your international clients?
What difficulties do you encounter when developing friendship with international clients?
When do you find it easy to become friends with your international clients?

Please share your stories in the comment section below.

More Cultural Skills For Today’s Tip

Last month’s Cross-Cultural Communication Tip
- Find the similarities and recognize them

This month’s series takes reviews last month’s tips to build trust in cross-cultural communication and adds an international sales perspective. Remember to download the free calender for an easy reference to all of the 30 Cross-Cultural Communication Challenge Tips on trust. Get the complete International Sales Best Practices series here.

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International Sales Best Practices