Shortly after my post about how spelling errors can cause your buyers in another country to dismiss your company as “unprofessional,” comes this post at Harvard Business about sales emails that are “lost in translation.”

Nadia Nassif writes about two kinds of problems in sales emails: first, spelling and grammar errors; and second, using a generic message that is not personalized to address your potential client’s needs.  She has a great example of an email she received, and how she would re-write it to increase its effectiveness. Check it out here.

I think there is another message in this example that still needs to be teased out, about the challenges of using new social media channels in cross-cultural selling.  (The email in her example was written by someone who is in a LinkedIn group and referenced a discussion there.)  There’s lots of excitement and interest about using social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to enhance the relationship-building process and increase overall sales effectiveness (see this discussion of Sales 2.0).  These tools tend to have a culture and style of their own and, no surprise, they vary across different countries and cultures.  Trying to follow the style that fits both the channel and the regional culture of your intended prospects requires extremely careful attention to nuance.  What makes it more tricky is that, to be effective, web 2.0 messages should be highly personalized – that’s the whole point, users are involved in relationships, not just taking in one-way pushed content.  That means you can’t count on the carefully crafted sales messaging put together by your marketing team, each message should be unique, and the risk of communication gaffes across languages increases significantly.  How can globalized businesses use these tools effectively to sell across cultures?

The Boston Globe published an interesting article yesterday about brain research on the differences in perception between Westerners and Asians.* The article cites several examples of differences in perception from earlier experiments, and then talks about recent research with brain scans that show differences in the way we actually use our brains, even in very basic activities.

The experiment asked Americans and Asians to do two tasks: estimate the length of a line, and evaluate the length of the line relative to a square. It turns out that first task is easier for Americans, while the second is easier for Asians, and the researchers could see the relative effort involved in the brain scans. The results line up with other research that shows that Westerners are consistently more likely to focus on a central or key item in a picture, while Asians are more likely to take in the whole context and background in a picture.

While it’s fascinating to see the differences in the actual brain scans, I don’t think it comes as a surprise to any American who’s lived in Asia, or vice versa! And just because we can see the differences in the brain scans, doesn’t mean that we know why we think differently, whether the source of these differences is nature or nurture. Yet the research does validate significant differences in eastern and western cultures, and gives use some insight into how these differences may show up in everyday interactions between people. As the author, Carey Goldberg, notes: ‘On a broader scale, researchers say, it might be useful in business schools for students preparing to work in East-West trade, to help clarify culture gaps. “Understanding cultural differences in the mind is really important as the world globalizes,” Park said.’

This is the most interesting part to me. What are the implications of differences in perception for how we work together in global businesses?

Awareness of the significant differences in thinking among people from different regions of the world leads me to think again about the importance of having a human “bridge” in cross-border business operations, someone from one culture who works in the other culture’s location or team, and helps people from both cultures to understand the other, and to work together more effectively. In the past, this was usually an expat manager sent from company headquarters to lead a new country operation; today, this is more often an Indian account manager or team lead who works at a client site in the US or Europe to manage outsourced IT or BPO services.

The research also highlights for me the importance of building relationships between people in both countries, to make it easier to learn about and work with the different patterns of thought and communication. While we often think of this as something individuals do, businesses can build in processes and infrastructure that increase the likelihood of individual relationships developing. Creating organizational structures that align goals and activities among individuals in different regions, such as the “two-in-a-box” model used by many Indian IT services, incents individuals to work together on a daily basis, for mutual benefit. Planning for (and budgeting for) face-to-face meetings in each country at the beginning of a new operation, and on an ongoing basis, is also key, not just a nice thing to do. Cross-cultural training and regional education materials are also useful, especially when a company is just starting to work in a new region, and everyone needs to get up the learning curve quickly. Businesses can also make it easier for individuals to work together with simple tools that make it easier for employees who are widely dispersed to find and access each other: online team portals, employee profiles, internal directories, and international calling capabilities. When employees talk to employees in another country frequently, as part of their daily work, understanding of the cultural differences in perception and communication grows quickly, and it becomes much easier to work together effectively. And as businesses globalize, this becomes an increasingly important factor in our success.

*I use the terms here the way the article did – loosely – referring to Americans and Europeans with the former term, and Japanese, Chinese and Koreans with the latter. Obviously this excludes large portions of the human population.