Sales Training in Africa

Pascale Sztum is a Principal consultant, trainer and researcher with Working With Africans. Member of East Africa Business Communities

For decades, Africans’ capacity building has been occupying a considerable place on the budget of foreign development agencies. So far huge amounts of money have been poured into public servants’ technical and managerial skills development.

In addition to that, cohorts of Africans have been enrolled in foreign universities in order to become the efficient and effective public decision makers and managers of the future.

Now that the African economies have been liberalized, more efforts are being put into developing capacity building in the private sector.

Both foreign donors and successful African businesses are funding private sector employees and executives’ training programs..

Training takes place either within academic institutions or within training centers that operate like private businesses. Both local and increasingly foreign training providers operate in African markets. The packages that they offer feature sales training, high performance team training, ethics training, communication skills, teachers training, human resources management training, leadership skills training, mediation skills training to cite a few.

Many foreign firms are operating in African countries through franchising.

So you may think that we are on the right way to develop Africans capacity to compete in the global economy and finally to succeed their fight against poverty?

Well at first sight we might think so but a second look gives a different view…

Why?

There is a serious knowledge gap between the content of training products sold by businesslike training firms and the content of the findings gained by academic research.

Central to these findings is the global firms’ rising awareness that adjustment must be made to handle situations and people in different cultures. Appropriate approaches, attitudes, behavior, communication style are not universal as most training packages assume it.

Let us examine the example of Sales training:

For almost two decades onwards, research in international marketing has proved that consumers have different expectations not only regarding the product that they value and buy but also regarding the services that comes with the product. Among these services, expectations differ as to how the seller must act, react and market the product.

Huge cultural differences exist not only across continents but also across countries. For example, selling a product to a British or to a German consumer requires a completely different attitude from the seller. In each of these markets, the way the seller effectively handle the job depends on what is locally culturally acceptable. This concerns how the sellers perceive their role, how they see the potential client, what the buyer expects from the seller.

Now let us take the introductory part of a sales training and examine what is hidden behind the recommendations:

• Design a life of purpose and destiny
• Develop a bullet-proof self esteem
• Value yourself
• Set goals for success
• Visualize successful outcomes
• Build unstoppable self-confidence

Such self perception of how the seller should approach his/her own job is based on a number of culturally bound assumptions:

First the approach is process-oriented and encourages the seller to look at the job as a transaction unaffected by feelings and relationship. While such approach makes sense in the USA as well as in a limited number of countries, not all societies share it. In some societies, the feelings and the relationships are central to the job and sellers approach their job with a completely different way of thinking and behaving.

The development of a bullet-proof self esteem and unstoppable self- confidence also feature the American way to effectively approach selling. In many societies, mainly these where an individual’s identity is shaped by his/her group of reference, people do not value self-confidence or self esteem. As a result, a seller developing the attitudes and approaches suggested in sale training but operating in a society embedded with different beliefs may appear by his/her own people as showing some sign of aggressiveness, of individualism, which would be severely frown upon.

You can think that people enrolled in a sale training usually know the norms and values of their society and subsequently, they would automatically make an adjustment or challenge the trainer with some statement about their own work environment… However they would not!

Why? There is a cultural and a technical explanation to that.

First of all, in many African countries, education takes place in a context where students are not encouraged to challenge their trainers/teachers. With little exposure to foreign cultures and societies, they see the know-how from the Western societies as the only avenue to their future success.

Second, they could not technically because they have not developed their cross-cultural competences. What are these competences? They are the ability to uncover the invisible messages, beliefs and ideas hidden behind visible practices and attitudes. This is what I have done with the introduction of the sales training.

It is only when the invisible becomes visible that we can detect the cultural limitation of what the training proposes.

What is the consequence of enrolling Africans in a sales training featuring supposedly universal skills?

The mastering of these skills will not affect the environment the seller is operating in so if there are major cultural differences in what is valued, the seller will discover that the new skills are of no use in his/her society as they do not enhance the sales.

Of course, if Africans equipped with these skills were dealing with American clients, they would definitely enhance their chance of making a deal but how many American consumers will African sale people come across in their home country?

How should Africans handle sales transactions if these training are not culturally appropriate in their environment?

They should uncover the rules of successful sales in their own environment and develop sales training on this basis.

Broadly speaking, each society should reflect on the rules and values that will enhance the sales and understand that these rules and norms vary across cultures.

The current context in which capacity building is taking place shows that there is a disconnection between the scientific and the business worlds.

While the academic institutions are busy exploring cultural differences, the business of training continues to sell obsolete and culturally inappropriate training products.

Africans do not need to fall behind. They should be encouraged to request culturally appropriate training products or impose the seller to undergo a cultural adaptation of their foreign training products.

 

This article was originally posted on East Africa Business Communities

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