French Business Culture - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

1 Apr 2020 · 3 min

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2:53

In this short video, Zach Selch, a veteran of 30 years selling to France, records a brief on‑location segment from La Défense, the modern business district that houses many European headquarters of high‑tech and financial firms. He explains a key cultural communication difference that can make or break a sales pitch to French companies. In the United States, presenters typically state the conclusion first – e.g., “there is a steel shortage” – and then back it up with data. French audiences, however, expect the logical build‑up to come first: they want to see the chain of evidence (earthquake in Japan, higher oil prices, monopolised steel production) before the final conclusion is revealed. Presenting a fact without that step‑by‑step reasoning can irritate French listeners and cause a loss of credibility. Selch advises international sellers to restructure their decks to lead with the supporting context and only arrive at the conclusion at the end, thereby aligning with French expectations and improving sales effectiveness. The video ends with a call‑to‑action inviting viewers to contact his firm for help growing international sales.

Chapters

Good morning, bonjour. It's a rainy morning in beautiful Paris. I am in La Défense, a neighborhood in France, in Paris, which is a beautiful neighborhood, a new neighborhood. It's where all the high-tech companies are. And if you do business with a high-tech company or a financial institution or a major corporation, chances are their headquarters are here. Very often their European headquarters are here. It's a great neighborhood. There are hotels here, pretty good restaurants, not as great as downtown in terms of restaurants. Very, very modern, so you don't have the charm maybe of downtown, but it's beautiful and still green and very comfortable and very easy to get around. I've been selling to France for about 30 years, and it's a lot of closer culturally to Americans, or other Europeans of course, than China or Japan or Africa. But there still are a few cultural differences that really impact how we sell, and I want to talk about one of those today. Probably the biggest one that impacts selling is how they internalize facts. Okay, in America we are the poster child for essentially announcing a fact and then coming and backing it up with With supporting evidence. So let's give this an example. Let's say I'm selling to a company and my primary problem— the problem that I solve is I help deal with a shortage of steel. Okay, so I'm going to come out and I'm going to say, well, there's a shortage of steel, with the assumption that everybody in the room believes that and understands that. And then I'm going to launch a half dozen slides talking about how we got to this situation. Situation, why there's a shortage of steel, how come I believe there's a shortage of steel. And that's the typical American way of presenting facts. Americans do this because we're trying to save time and we, we get a little fidgety when people start building a case in a presentation. In France, they want to do it the other way around. And if you come out and you put out a fact on a slide or you say a statement without building up the steps to prove your supporting evidence, You're going to aggravate everybody in the room and really you're going to lose your audience. What you have to do then is start with the 5 slides saying, well, because of an earthquake in Japan and because of a higher oil price, steel production has been monopolized in certain places and steel is coming off the market, which means that there's a shortage of steel. And then you reach the conclusion of there's a shortage of steel, which is where you wanted to start with if you were doing this in America. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help.
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