Q: Imagine that your focal service organization is going to expand into a country which has a very different culture from the home company. Identify that country and a few significant cultural differences between the home and expansion countries. For each difference listed, indicate how the service process may differ between countries.
The process that the potential users -salesforces- follow may seem similar at a first glance between the U.S. and Latin American countries; however cultural differences create major issues to solve.
Salesforces follow a road of:
a) talking to prospective customers
b) submitting proposals
c) closing deals
and d) following up delivery of products/services according to the contract
There are two main differences -related to culture- that must been taken into consideration:
1) Personal relationship are strongly considered in Latin America, the relationship is more important than the product/service itself.
2) Latin America culture does not document activities as often as the U.S.
These two differences require that salesforce.com adapts its processes. First adaptation required: the system should provide more tools that foster personal relationships, such as birthday and anniversary dates of potential customers, lunch and dinner preferences, sports and leisure preferences.
The other adaptation requires more training and a simplification of the system: many fields to fill in salesforce.com or complexity may discourage Latin American saleforces from using the service. This is critical for creating momentum for the service, and is also a challenge for salesforce.com because they have to adapt their service, which is based on a standard product used by a vast majority.
The ability of salesforce.com to meet this two main differences will be critical in order to succeed as a service in a different cultural environment.
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