NLP podcast extract: Martin Woodcock on International Sales

"I'm Martin Woodcock, former vice president in South East Europe for Oracle, so I've managed a collection of around thirteen countries - the smallest being countries like Malta, Montenegro, Bosnia and so on, and larger ones being Greece and Romania. so I was in charge of licence sales for Oracle across those countries."

I'm starting my own venture from Australia, after the end of my thirteen years in Oracle."

"In terms of my specialist areas, selling business intelligence systems - in order to sell these business intelligence systems you have to understand how the people that run companies think and make decisions, and their need to have information flowing through to them to make those decisions."

"Obviously what I'm talking about is from my Eastern European experiences, from an Eastern European perspective, working for a global corporation with a global HQ that's based in California. And Oracle is a very well-structured organisation, with clear business processes that are global business processes and, so as a line manager, one of the things that you have to be very good at is blending these global business processes and local cultures."

"So first of all as a corporate manager you have to adopt the corporate line, and follow the processes. Then you have to understand the variations that you are able to make. I think one of the other areas that you have to blend in is your style of selling. So if you take a continuum of California, through American, Europe and Asia and if you look at the balance between selling products and developing relationships as a method of selling - you'd start off in California where product selling is absolutely key, and as you move eastwards, the degree of relationship selling increases, so by the time you get to Asia, it’s a thoroughly relation-based process. And they'll take what products you have based on relationship."

"So in the middle, Western Europe is more product-selling, and Eastern Europe is more relationship based selling, and the dividing line is around about Vienna."

"What this means, in terms of some of the challenges, is how you recruit and train the sales force. Once again, one of the challenges here, one of the things that you have to do is to be local to your local customers even though you're a global organisation, and this comes through both from the product side but also from your marketing side as well. If you’re writing to a CEO of a company in Slovakia you have to have the accents on his name, otherwise you just don't get through to him. So you have to be as local as you need to be to be professional in front of those people."

"The other thing is, my countries are high-growth countries so year-on-year we are significantly growing revenues, increasing staffing and so on. The key challenges there are keeping staff motivated to really support this growth rate. The second one is recruiting competent staff, and then when you have that body of people how do you develop those people, how do you give them motivation, and set them on the path to develop the organisation when they're coming from very small countries - where their education is different, their grasp of English and other languages is different and their grasp of Western culture is different as well."

"I think the first thing is that you have to believe in the processes yourself. At corporate management level, it's your responsibility to manage your operation in the way that your corporation wants you to. And you have to understand your scope of deviation from those processes - the correct amount of leaway, but consistently, enforce those processes."

"The first thing is, you have to look at how the customer wants to be sold to, and so you can't do things dramatically different from how a customer wants to be sold to. So if a customer only deals with people that they know and trust, you can’t just pick a phone up and expect to sell product."

"So you have to get this blend between product selling and relationship selling. I think the important thing there is the way that you select, train and really direct your sales force. You accept that they have to develop a relationship. They also have to be known to be able to sell."

"But from the corporations point of view, a sales person has to be able to present the sales benefits, the solution benefits to these customers. So what you're doing is saying 'I accept the relationship, but we’re going to sell these products hard' so you're in fact, creating that balance there."

"In some areas it needs tough decisions. If people have a very good relationship but cannot pick up the required understanding of product selling, then it might be time to change."

Read of listen to the full Martin Woodcock transcript and podcast on international sales.

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Liam Beale
Business Development Manager
PPI Business NLP: NLP Training and NLP-based Business Training