Friction in the context of sales refers to anything that creates hesitation or delays a customer’s decision to make a purchase. It can be a result of unanswered questions, ambiguous information, or a lack of trust in the brand and its ability to solve the problem or need.

Considering that distance makes communication harder, sales friction increases when companies expand in international markets. As a result, it's important for SMEs to keep looking for ways to reduce this friction, shorten sales cycles and get returns on the investments made.

What Drives Sales Friction?

Four key factors contribute to sales friction are:

Trust: Customers might be unfamiliar with your brand and uncertain about its credibility and reliability.
Lack of Information: Customers may struggle to find answers to basic questions about your product or service.
Unclear Information: When available information is ambiguous or incomplete, it raises further questions and slows down decision-making.
Slow response time: Customers may not be willing to wait for your company to come back with information and may move on with an alternative.

A low-friction sales process proactively addresses customer concerns before they even arise, enabling faster purchase decisions.

Initiatives to Reduce Friction in International Markets

Understand Your Customer’s Decision-Making Process

Before we can define ways to reduce friction, it is fundamental that we understand our customer and how they purchase by breaking down the different stages they go through from initial consideration through to evaluation and final decision.

As you define this process, or as many call “customer journey”, it's important you understand in which channels your customers get information, and in what channels they prefer to actually purchase.

This will give you an understanding of what brand assets you need to develop and in which channels you need to communicate through.

The Website: Your Most Important Asset

A well-designed website is fundamental for any company looking to reduce friction, especially when expanding in international markets. Why? Because websites can help address all four key drivers of friction:

Building Trust: As the first point of contact, your website shapes the customer’s perception of your brand’s professionalism and reliability.
Providing Information: A comprehensive website presents all the necessary information, from product details to customer testimonials, in an easily accessible format.
Clarifying Ambiguity: Simple, consistent, and clear communication prevents misunderstandings and ensures customers have the answers they need.
Quick response time: A well attended website allows HQ teams to receive and react to enquiries or questions faster by minimizing intermediaries.

Develop Effective Sales Support Assets

Traditional catalogues alone are no longer sufficient to support modern sales processes, especially when dealing with complex or highly technical solutions. SMEs must adopt a multi-tiered and multi-channel approach to brand communication, tailored to the customer’s stage in the decision-making process.

Recommended Sales Assets:

1. Offline Engagements:

Catalogues:

Both physical and digital versions accessible via QR codes.

Presentations:

Brief introductory presentation for management and more detailed presentations for working level teams.
Make sure that you tell a story regardless of whether it´s a 5 or 25 slide presentation.

Brochures/Flyers:

Introductory assets that communicate the brand’s purpose, offerings, and key references.
These can be tailored to specific customer segments or industries.

2. Online Engagements:

Website:

Your primary digital asset.

Landing Pages:

Dedicated pages targeting specific customer profiles and designed to convert traffic to leads through document downloads or contact forms.

Short Videos:

Engaging, concise content with clear messages for corporate or product promotions.
Can be used across all offline and online channels and digital assets

Reviews:

Showcase documented references, success stories, and third-party reviews to establish credibility.

Simplify Pricing Structures

It is very likely that your international expansion will require you to build a distributor partner network to help you reach customers in foreign markets. For these partners to evaluate whether working with your brand is easy or inefficient they will often look at your pricing model.

The simpler and easy to apply the pricing model is, the easier for the partner to decide to work with you.

We therefore recommend applying commercial frameworks that are structured and transparent to partners, making it clear to understand the benefits as well as the requirements for all partners in the market.

If the pricing of your solution is driven by multiple variables, tools like price calculators will help customers understand their cost based on different factors. Such a calculator does not need to be complex and can be developed in a simple Excel file.

Train your sales teams

This may sound obvious, but sales teams need to be trained frequently to ensure they are up to date with product & price information, new launches and timescales or common answers to technical questions in order to avoid delaying the sales process.

With staff rotation being common in sales teams, reducing the learning curve for new employees will have a direct impact on their ability to be more responsive and reduce friction in the sales process. Using Commonly Asked Questions or AI tools will certainly help inexperienced sales teams be more effective when engaging customers.

Commonly Asked Questions

It is very likely, almost certain, that a high % of your customers will be asking the same question. Answering the same questions again and again via email, or through your sales teams, is an inefficient use of your resources.

As a result it is important that you keep a Commonly Asked Questions document or section in your website that will help customers answer those common questions. This information can also feed a chatbot or an AI engine to automate this process through your website or an app.

AI Tools for Sales Effectiveness

AI is a technology that can drastically reduce the friction in the sales process.

It is very difficult for your sales teams to have answers to all questions, especially those that are most technical. As a result, it often takes days if not weeks to get the answer that will allow you to move forward along the sales process.

These delays can increase exponentially if the communication is with a customer in a different time zone, and can be more common among new starters and companies with high staff rotation.

That’s where AI can help. The technology can process vast amounts of information from multiple sources (e.g. your presentations, brochures, videos, technical sheets, catalogues or white papers) to answer questions as soon as your customers need to know, whether it’s during a sales visit or through a chatbot when customers are visiting your website.

Imagine how much a sales cycle can be shortened if you can answer in seconds, instead of days, questions or concerns from a potential buyer.

The key technological challenge is the reliability of the output generated by these AI engines, as giving the wrong information could have negative consequences, and in some cases even delay or end the sales process altogether.

Doing the right due diligence and understanding how each solution minimizes hallucinations (or random, incorrect output) is therefore essential.

In summary…

Reducing friction in the sales process is essential for SMEs aiming to expand into international markets as it shortens the lead time to building initial sales and getting returns on the investments made.

By understanding the customer journey, leveraging appropriate channels, and investing in strategic sales support assets—especially a robust website—, and leveraging new technologies like AI, SMEs can foster trust, provide clarity, and accelerate decision-making.

If you need help understanding your customer’s journey and building effective sales support assets, please contact us and we will be happy to assist.

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Reducing Sales Friction for SMEs expanding internationally

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