Out of Your Element

The first episode of Out of Your Element. Chris Blaylock and Curtis Green talk to Norman Guadagno, CMO of New Era Technology, about what actually happens when a company tries to sell across a border.

Norman has spent twenty years in marketing, including a stretch as a fractional CMO with clients around the world. He brought a story about a global software company, headquartered in India, that was winning in Europe and winning in Asia and kept hitting a wall in the United States.

The mirror moment

The team in India was excellent. Productive, high quality, working while the US slept. They ran the outbound and they ran the digital advertising, and the deals they were chasing in the US were five and six figures. It kept falling flat.

For twenty years he has had people in Germany, in Australia, and across Asia tell him they need a team on the ground who can speak to the local buyer. Not once has anyone said the same thing to him about the United States. The US gets treated as the default rather than as a market with its own context. Moving the outbound calling and the media buying into the US changed the equation.

The bubble

We are all connected, instantly and transparently, and the second everyone logs off they walk back out into their own street, in their own language, past ads written by people who live there. The same Spanish is not the same Spanish in Spain and in Mexico.

Also covered

• Low context and high context cultures, and why saying things plainly does not travel the way Americans expect it to
• Why you can tell in one sentence whether the person next to you at the bar is local, and what that has to do with outbound email
• Homogenization: fifteen regional versions collapsing into one message watered down enough to work nowhere
• What machine translation gets right, and what still takes a native speaker to catch
• Five to eight seconds to land a message, and why a misstep inside those seconds is usually final
• Reading facial expressions, and what you give up when you post a video instead of showing up in person