Sales and Marketing – Global or local control?

Yesterday I had the same conversation twice.

In the morning it was with a major US medtech company.

In the afternoon, it was with a French engineering firm that sells all over the world.

The same conversation…

Is global HQ in charge of sales and marketing strategy? Or is it up to each country operation?

Surely it doesn’t matter if the results come in, right?

The complaint (‘challenge’?) for both of my conversationalists was where global commands stopped and local control came in.

In particular, they were exercised by the ability of local countries to block central initiatives, effectively wasting central effort and budget by rejecting centrally created campaigns out of hand.

It would appear in both cases that HQ and local country operations both suffer from some form of mutual myopia. Global doesn’t consult widely enough with the realities of local. And local has a strong and entrenched tendency to rubbish central initiatives before they’ve even heard them out.

Hey, you say, isn’t that just part of the cut-and-thrust of human nature?

Well, it may be… but it’s incredibly wasteful. Some would say wilfully obstructive. Both ways round.

In an SME business like ours, every penny counts, and is accountable. In larger corporations it seems that the value of money is often forgotten… dissociated from responsibility… someone else’s problem… somehow not real. This attitude is something that more CEOs should take note of, because they would almost always find massive savings very easily… but more of that at another time.

Back to the main topic – how to harmonise global and local. What’s to do?

Well, first the global team needs to really understand local realities and priorities. This includes local regulation, routes to market, competitive landscape, and so on.

If that sounds obvious, it’s not. At least, it’s rarely done well. Most often a dictat from the board is crudely imposed, ignoring whether it’s realistic at a local level.

In addition, there’s a skills issue. It’s pointless consulting local countries if you don’t understand the answers you’re getting. I can’t tell you the number of times when I’ve been in such consultation meetings and then find out afterwards that HQ people simply have not grasped what the local country has been talking about. Or have found the answers inconvenient and so have swept them under the carpet or misinterpreted them.

So the first issue is to invest in the right skills and knowledge at the HQ team.

The counterpoint is to have strong local sales leadership who force their sales teams to objectively consider the initiatives coming from HQ.

Many sales (and marketing) teams are stuck in their comfort zone and fear change. They don’t want to do things differently. They don’t want to elevate or change their contact points with customers. They don’t feel confident to go direct where the former model is through intermediaries, or change to channel contacts where they formerly talked to end users.

Strong local sales & marketing leadership will embrace change, encourage and empower their people (that means training sales and marketing people in new ways of working), and ‘manage upwards’ to ensure their people are set challenging but realistic targets.

Easy to say, hard to do.

Then the final piece in the jigsaw is all about command and authority.

HQ needs the power to command local. Simply asking nicely, or some ridiculous idea of ‘persuading’ is complete nonsense. If we return to human nature, people will simply carry on in their comfort zone unless they are obliged to shift and develop. That goes not just for sales but also for marketing. You can’t have sales being set new targets and then the marketing people not be compelled to support them properly.

At the same time local must have sufficient authority to be able to push back on an argued and rational basis. Not ‘in our experience’ but ‘based on this evidence’. However much HQ strategy might want to achieve a result for Wall Street or the European Markets, it must be considered achievable by each participating local country, and more to the point, properly resourced.

Of course, none of us expect the perennial local vs global issue to be sorted quickly. If it was that easy, it would have been done long ago.

But it’s a pretty poor board-level leadership team who don’t recognise these realities and get stuck into the challenge of balancing global and local pressures with a viable power and skills structure.

The ones who do usually see the commercial benefit rapidly flowing through.

I hope you find these bulletins entertaining. I’m happy to discuss all relevant engagements – from customer community creation, to directorial mentoring, to strategy development, to thought-leadership content development, to full campaign structuring and management, and more.

Do get in touch!

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