Great Track Record at Home, but Low Sales Performance Abroad? Three Core Questions You Need to Ask.
A salesperson may have years of experience and a strong track record at home. And yet, when they sell in a new market, success is often a lot harder to achieve. At the core is a problem companies often overlook.
Growth Means Expansion
For many companies, continued growth means expansion into new markets. How that happens can vary. Sales teams may remain in their home market and try to build relationships with new buyers via emails, virtual calls, and even repeated travel to the new market. A team member may relocate to the new target market to grow the business, boots on the ground. Or a company may choose to work with a sales or distribution partner already located in the new market.
When things don’t go as planned and sales underperform, managers look in many different places, for example: Are we using the right marketing channels? Is the pipeline healthy? Have we chosen the right partner? Are our salespeople following up on all leads? Is the offer too expensive? Is our positioning off?
These are all valid questions. There are many reasons why sales underperform.
But there’s another factor that’s easy to overlook: the cultural environment in which selling takes place and the demands it creates — particularly, the real-life mental processing demands.
Selling Is Knowing What to Do Next
Selling is about knowing what to do next in a conversation. But when you’re selling in a different culture — or to someone from one — figuring that out becomes a lot harder. You wonder:
Was that a real objection?
Is their enthusiasm genuine?
How should I respond to that?
The list goes on.
When you enter a new market, your salespeople are no longer only selling. They're making judgements in a foreign cultural environment guided by different rules.
The Biggest Challenge: Real-Time Processing
Sales conversations depend heavily on real-time processing: formulating relevant questions, listening for key information, responding to client concerns and objections, recognizing buying signals, maintaining rapport — it all needs to happen in real time, with the backdrop of a culture you may not fully understand.
In your home market, you know what to do. More importantly, you do it automatically. But when the cultural rules are unfamiliar and the language is not as instinctual, your judgements and decisions become more conscious.
That requires a lot of mental energy and takes attention away from the actual business of selling. It slows you down. It harbors the risk of making mistakes. Performance suffers.
The Three Hard Questions to Ask
If things don’t go as planned — or actually, before you get ready to sell in a new market — make sure to ask these three questions:
Can our salespeople read conversations with buyers from the new culture well enough to know what to do next?
Do they have the skills required to actually do what needs to be done to move the conversation forward?
And, most importantly, can they handle the processing demands of selling across cultures with enough ease to stay focused on the goal?
The consequences of not exploring these questions are costly: missed opportunities, lost deals, and sales targets that aren’t met.
Empower Your Sales Team
There’s no magic wand to minimize the real-time processing demands of sales conversations in a language that's not your own. But you can empower your sales team (or yourself) and increase the chances of success with preparation and practice:
Developing accurate insights into the cultural environment of your new market.
Advancing high-level verbal and non-verbal skills adapted to your specific target group.
Internalizing knowledge and skills, so they come naturally in the moment.
I can help you get there. Let's talk.
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2026 Transatlantic Coaching & Training, LLC.
