After years of working in companies in front line roles, one thing has struck me more than anything else as a reason for failure - clarity of communication, or perhaps the lack of clarity. Much has been written over the years on the topic of communication and it is not the purpose of this story to regurgitate that thinking here. Rather, the purpose of this story is to underline, again, just how important it is to ensure that what we aim to say is actually what is being heard by the recipient. It is an unfortunate reality that what we aim to say is frequently misinterpreted - often with serious consequences.
Miscommunication is rife throughout organisations and that is because whilst we often have a very clear idea of what we are saying, we struggle to deliver our messages in such a way that their actual meaning is not lost when they are received by our intended audience. Why is this? As a graduate of modern languages I have always been fascinated by the complexities of communication and the interpretation of language. It is hard enough to communicate within the boundaries of one language, but if you throw in the range of linguistic comprehension that you find in international companies, where for many English is a second language, then communication can become extremely hit and miss. The impact of miscommunication is never more profoundly felt than in the sales arena - simply because the stakes are that much higher.
Sales professionals tend to be inherently optimistic and driven by their ambition to sell a much needed solution to their customer in exchange for a financial contribution towards their sales target. It is this combination of focus, optimism and need for a timely purchase order that creates a problematic arena for faithful communication. This too is only the picture of the sales side of the equation. Customers tend to be governed by differing, often opposing dynamics such as anxiety, caution, a need for minimal risk and quick returns in exchange for the purchase order. These are the forces at work in the landscape in which any deal must be done. The different nature of these forces frequently means that sales communication to the customer must tread a difficult line that teeters somewhere between honesty and a necessity to occasionally ‘bend the truth’ in order to keep one’s nose ahead in the game.
I remember a time when I was working in sales leadership. Net new business or ‘break-through’ was always my bag. If there was an area that my strategic account needed to get into then it was a task generally thrown in my direction. On this particular occasion my account team had been trying to break into positioning a mobile advertising solution with a global mobile operator for a good 18 months without much success. Before long, the account president dropped it at my feet. “See what you can do with this Jim” was the simple, open ended request. It was a great challenge and right at the bleeding edge of where the industry was going, so I jumped at it.
Quite quickly, and after a bit of ferreting around, I made a few of the right contacts and started building out a very radical commercial approach based on sharing the spoils of any success - revenue share in other words. Ever the one to push the boundaries of strategic relationships, I built the commercial model and then insisted on a completely transparent collaboration with my counterpart. I did this so there would be no misunderstanding relating to how the revenues would be split. Naturally, the customer received the lion’s share. Before long, the customer engagement was deep and I knew it would take a catastrophic error for the competition to dislodge our privileged position. A few months down the track and the solution was scoped, approved and it was only a moment of time before contracts would be on the table.
It was during this time, that both sides developed acute focus. Once the contract was agreed everything for the next few years would be set in stone. New stakeholders moved into the fray, red lines were drawn up and discussed and many an hour was spent on the phone with the lawyers. One morning my customer rang me and in a nano-second I could tell that something was wrong. By this stage we had become very close, there almost wasn’t a day that had gone by when I hadn’t seen him or talked to him. We were very similar and had become, to a large degree, friends. I asked him if he was ok? This was his reply, “Jim, what are you doing? I am so disappointed. I don’t know if I can trust you.” I stood there by the coffee machine, literally mortified. I had no idea what he was talking about. I asked him immediately what was wrong and what he meant. He described part of the agreement we had discussed for the past 6 months - so far so good, yes, this was correct - and then he described one of the commercial terms, with borderline outrage. It was strange because he described what I believed we had discussed perfectly. The only thing was for the past 6 months he had clearly misunderstood a small but significant detail. It had gone into the contract and his boss had torn strips off him. After a great deal of verbal ballet on my part I managed to remove the sharp object that he was metaphorically planning to stick in me. We smoothed it out and after a week or so we were more or less on stable ground. I am pleased to say we still signed a global deal.
What I will say though, is this. It could have been different. It could have gone another way. It might have had such serious consequences that we might not have entered that division with new solutions for years. Equally, the misunderstanding was neither his fault nor mine. What it came down to in the end was pure linguistics. He was from Czech and naturally I was a Brit. For obvious reasons my comprehension of English was different to his and how he had interpreted one word had momentarily driven a stake into our relationship.
Nothing convinced me more that how we communicate can sometimes be the difference between success and failure either on deals or relationships or both.
There is a positive note to the tale and that is we remain the most marvellous of friends.