Sales teams
International and US salespeople who meet buyers across a cultural line and need a shared playbook for meetings, negotiation, and follow-up.
A cultural research practice · 25 languages
Doing business in the United States A guide to US business culture.
A research-based guide for international companies, sales teams, trade associations, and chambers of commerce that want to do business in the United States and need an expert on US culture. It extends Dr. Zachary McKinley’s doctoral research into the differences that distinguish people from the United States from much of the rest of the world—and into what those differences do to selling, negotiation, hiring, and everyday work.
The primary audience is foreign firms and professionals entering US marketplaces. A second track serves North Americans who must adapt when they work or sell abroad. The tone is academic where the evidence is, and practical where a meeting, a contract, or a dinner check is on the line.
Dr. Zachary McKinleyDBA · Liberty University · cross-culturally adaptive selling
Advisory work
Who I help
Work for organizations that need US culture applied to a real market move—not a generic etiquette list.
Executives relocating to the United States
Leaders moving into a US role who need to read a room, a hierarchy, and a contract the way American counterparts will.
Market-entry and expansion leads
People responsible for bringing a foreign company into the United States, or for deepening an existing US foothold.
Trade associations, chambers of commerce, and export agencies
Groups that brief member companies on doing business in the United States and want a research-based session, workshop, or speaking engagement.
Who it’s for
Entering the US market—and adapting a US approach abroad
Most readers come here to understand how Americans buy, meet, negotiate, and hire—so a foreign team can enter the United States without being misread. A second path is for North Americans whose defaults—direct speech, clock time, written agreements—travel badly when left unexamined.
The guide
The dimensions this guide unpacks
These are the patterns that show up again and again in cross-cultural research and in McKinley’s 2022 study of North American technology salespeople.
Individualism
A strong “I” identity, personal accountability, and relatively loose group ties—without pretending every American is the same.
Directness
Low-context speech: saying what you mean, hearing “yes” as yes, and mistaking politeness for agreement.
Time
Sequential, monochronic calendars: punctuality as respect, agendas that end on time, and discomfort with simultaneous conversations.
Small talk
A short social runway that does not imply intimacy—and the American “How are you?” that is usually a greeting, not a question.
Optimism
A preference for forward motion, positive framing, and solutions language that can sound naive—or refreshing—abroad.
Selling norms
Pitch the value early, quantify the outcome, and treat the relationship as something that grows after the business case is clear.
Relationship vs. transaction
Americans can do a first deal before they have become friends. Many cultures reverse that order.
Hierarchy
Accessible bosses, first names, and ideas expected from the room—while responsibility still sits somewhere specific.
Tipping and service
A service economy in which the tip is part of how the work is paid, not an optional flourish.
Contracts and rules
Universalist legal culture: the document, not the friendship, is expected to carry the agreement.
Work and private life
Specific rather than diffuse: job, family, and friendship are more separated than in many other societies.
Regional difference
Texas is not New York. The US is a country of regions, industries, and immigrant histories, not a single personality.
The research behind the site
An extension of McKinley (2022).
In his Doctor of Business Administration dissertation at Liberty University, Zachary Paul McKinley studied how experienced North American technology salespeople try to sell to non-US buyers—and where cultural mismatch gets in the way. This site takes that research public, in plain language, and keeps building on it.
McKinley, Z. P. (2022). Adapting North American selling methods to cross-cultural technology sales engagements in the borderless global economy. Doctoral dissertation, Liberty University. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/3802/
Meet the expertIn his Doctor of Business Administration dissertation at Liberty University, Zachary Paul McKinley studied how experienced North American technology salespeople try to sell to non-US buyers—and where cultural mismatch gets in the way. This site takes that research public, in plain language, and keeps building on it.
Blog
Insights, written to be used
Short essays aimed at the questions people actually search: US business culture, doing business in the United States, selling to Americans, and cross-cultural selling.
2026-11-06
Cross-cultural selling: adapting North American methods—and reading American ones
Cross-cultural selling fails in patterned ways. McKinley’s 2022 Liberty University study named the North American behaviors in play and the cultural collisions—directness, assertiveness, power distance, universalism—that most often distort the deal.
Read more →2026-11-06Doing business in the United States: what foreign teams should know before the first meeting
“Doing business in the US” is less a mystery of etiquette than a shift in sequence: show the value, respect the clock, put agreements on paper, and do not wait for a hidden meaning that is not coming.
Read more →2026-11-06US business culture explained: the defaults that shape an American meeting room
People search “US business culture” because a meeting went strangely. Here is a research-based reading of the defaults: speech, time, hierarchy, and how Americans decide to trust a counterpart.
Read more →Consulting
Need this applied to your organization?
Zachary advises international companies entering the US market, and US companies expanding abroad. Tell us about your goals and we will be in touch.