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Ask reps from any global company and they'll tell you they rely on their entire organization — from run-of-the-mill back office processing, to sales and marketing, customer service and beyond — to meet the competitive demands of today's international market.

Gone are the days when headquarters was in a major city and smaller field offices or a series of agents in foreign countries struggled to establish a local presence for the company. These days multinationals are investing heavily in penetrating local markets by establishing brick-and-mortar facilities, hiring sales and support staff, and offering carefully researched products tailored to the needs of that country's businesses and consumers.

This end-to-end global equation for success includes a heavy dependence on enterprise applications that enables a business to ensure rapid and accurate information delivery to far-flung operations. These applications are integrated with disparate systems and support a plethora of field-force hardware devices, such as laptops, PDAs and tablet PCs.

Customer relationship management is one such enterprise application that's necessary to strengthen a company's interaction with its customers, provide a window onto sales and marketing performance, and save time and money. Yet most multinationals have experienced more than their share of challenges trying to select and implement one CRM solution across multiple regions and countries. That's because when it comes to CRM systems, not all are created equal.

Let's look at an example. When the Web was coming into its own, and virtually every company was looking to take advantage of the business opportunities it presented, one would have thought that English was the native tongue of Planet Earth. Almost every site was in English and it took some time before companies got wise to the realities (and market potential) of the non-English-speaking business world. Soon after, Web sites were translated into several languages, better addressing the needs of a visitor whose location wasn't known.

The language barrier is just one major hurdle to be overcome in a successful multicountry CRM rollout. After all, it stands to reason that sales reps would be far more productive if they didn't have to translate the data fields on their PC screens before they could enter business-critical data into the CRM system. Cultural differences, nuances in employer-employee relationships and socioeconomic disparities are hard realities that vary significantly from region to region. Finding a CRM solution from a vendor experienced in multinational issues is essential to overcoming the inherent challenges.

Multinational companies know that failing to create multilingual, flexible business processes supported by the appropriate technology and infrastructure creates interminable obstacles for their work forces. So it's incumbent upon vendors serving these large firms to design products and services that will readily adapt to existing work flows and cultures in all parts of the world.

Every buyer — whether business-to-business or business-to-consumer — has certain expectations about their customer experience. Whether they're in Singapore or Washington, customers want responsiveness, relevant information and favorable pricing. While some companies have elevated the effectiveness of their sales processes to provide these basics, many still overlook the cultural differences that exist from region to region and country to country.

That's why a CRM system needs to work the way an organization already works. A vendor must be able to fit its products into the client's existing processes and infrastructure. Trying to impose a new work flow across an entire multinational is neither cost-effective nor an efficient use of time. When a new CRM system gets under way, the last thing a company needs is a disruption of its business or a reduction in productivity due to incessant training…or worse yet, disinterest from users because it was “easier” to do it the old way.

Other than language, existing processes and cultural gaps, there are further concerns to be addressed. For instance, in the Asia-Pacific region, enormous disparities from country to country exist in terms of economic norms and communications.

In Korea, all the sales representatives might have laptops. Yet in Indonesia the price of a laptop equals half a year's salary, so the sales staff could be using paper-based processes instead of entering information directly into the CRM system; that role is reserved for one or two people in their office. Broadband services are available in the Philippines, yet nonexistent in Vietnam. Therefore, it's vital that a solution be configured to work the way a country's business world operates, rather than to make assumptions that render the system impractical.

In fact, a CRM system designed especially for rollouts in many countries has benefits beyond the system itself. Multilingual CRM software goes a long way toward building better employee communication and training processes — and saving money. Employees are more productive when they're trained on a system that presents information in their native language. And they are more likely to put the new procedures in place when they understand all of the system's benefits.

The bottom line: What works in one country will likely not work in another. An adaptable, cross-cultural CRM system will maximize efficiency and productivity and increase return on investment.

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Sam Barclay (SBarclay@stayinfront.com) is vice president of business development at StayinFront, Fairfield, NJ.