Your defaults were trained in the United States.

What the dissertation found

McKinley (2022) asked a precise question: what happens when enterprise-technology salespeople formed by North American culture try to sell to non-US buyers, especially when they are competing against sellers who already share the buyer’s cultural world?

From interviews and questionnaires with twelve highly tenured North American technology salespeople, he coded two kinds of pattern. The first was how the sellers themselves worked. In order of how often those behaviors appeared, they were Communicating, Connecting, Consulting, Quarterbacking, Serving, Solving, Structuring, Teaching, and Understanding.

The second was where culture got in the way. The most frequent buyer-seller disparities were Direct versus Indirect communication, Assertiveness, Power Distance, and Universalism. Moderate interactions involved Specific versus Diffuse boundaries between work and private life, Sequential versus Synchronous views of time, and Collectivism.

He then read those interactions against the selling behaviors and proposed a framework for adapting North American methods so they fit foreign buyers more carefully. This page translates the published findings into practice. It does not invent extra statistics or quote results that were not in the public abstract and repository record.

Directness is not a universal virtue

If you grew up professionally in the United States, clarity feels like respect: put the request in the first paragraph, say no without a long prologue, treat “maybe” as an open question rather than a soft refusal. In more indirect cultures, that same clarity can sound blunt, impatient, or status-blind. Buyers may protect the relationship by avoiding a hard no, and a US seller may keep pushing long after the room has already decided.

Adaptation here is not dishonesty. It is learning to hear what was not put in a bullet. It is leaving more space after you ask a question. It is checking understanding without cornering someone in front of their colleagues. Communicating—the most prevalent behavior in McKinley’s sample—has to change shape without losing its purpose.

Assertiveness and power distance

US professional culture often rewards speaking up, disagreeing in the meeting, and going straight to the person who can decide. GLOBE data have long described the United States as relatively assertive in practice, and The Culture Factor’s updated Hofstede comparison still shows a lower power-distance score (40) than many of the markets US companies try to enter.

When a buyer’s culture expects deference to seniority, a US seller who “cuts to the economic buyer” can skip the people whose blessing the deal actually needs. Quarterbacking—a behavior McKinley observed, the coordination of many players—matters more, not less, abroad. Map the room. Ask who else should be included. Let a senior counterpart open the conversation. Save your sharpest challenge for a setting that will not cause someone to lose face.

Universalism, contracts, and “the way we do it”

North American sellers are often most comfortable when the rule applies to everyone: standard pricing, standard paper, standard process. Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner called this universalism. In their well-known “car and the pedestrian” dilemma, 93 percent of US respondents chose the rule-following answer, the same share as Canada and far above several Latin American countries in the same figure (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1997, fig. 4.1, as discussed in McKinley’s public research notes).

Abroad, particularism—the sense that the relationship and the situation should shape the exception—can look to a US seller like unfairness or sloppiness. To the buyer it can look like flexibility and trust. Adaptation means knowing which parts of your process are truly non-negotiable (compliance, safety, what you can sign) and which parts are just “how we do it at headquarters.” Connecting and consulting, two of the prevalent behaviors in the 2022 study, are how experienced sellers make that distinction without abandoning integrity.

Time and the rest of the calendar

Sequential, monochronic time—one meeting, one topic, an agenda that ends at :25 or :55—is a US comfort. Many markets run closer to synchronous time: several conversations at once, the person in front of you outranking the clock, a dinner that is the meeting. Moderate time-orientation mismatches showed up in McKinley’s study for a reason. If you close your laptop at the scheduled minute, you may be leaving before the real conversation starts. If you refuse to revisit a point already “decided” in week one, you may be fighting a culture that treats agreement as something that ripens.

Collectivism and the first personal question

US sellers can feel they are wasting time when a buyer wants to know who they are, who they belong to, and whether they will still be there in three years. In more collective settings that is not small talk; it is due diligence. The American habit of separating work from the rest of life (a specific rather than diffuse pattern in Trompenaars’s language) can read as cold. You do not have to fake a personality. You do have to let connection happen on their clock, not only yours.

A practical sequence when you feel the friction

1. Name your default before you name theirs. Direct, assertive, rule-first, clock-first: write it down so you can see it.
2. Diagnose the mismatch using the four high-frequency tensions from McKinley (2022): indirect communication, lower or higher assertiveness than you expected, power distance, and particularism.
3. Change the behavior, not just the slide. Communicating and connecting have to look different before the demo does.
4. Keep serving and solving—those traveled well in the study—while you adjust structuring and teaching to the buyer’s need for context, hierarchy, and time.
5. Debrief deals you lost. Cultural friction often hides inside “they went dark” or “procurement got involved.”

For the underlying dimensions and sources, read the complete guide. If you want this applied to a live team, start a consulting inquiry.

Need this applied to your organization? Zachary advises international companies, sales teams, and trade groups entering the US market—and US companies expanding abroad—through sales-team training, US market-entry advisory, executive briefings, and workshops or speaking. Start the conversation