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You’re about to give a business presentation to an international
audience? Don’t underestimate the importance of cross-cultural
training in such a situation. Using the example of Caitlin, our US sales
manager, Inter Nations helps you understand the value of cross-
cultural training for expats.

Cross-cultural training in a business context sounds like one of these
oft-cited buzzwords which are all the rage among HR executives.
Expats-to-be, though, may not know what exactly cross-cultural
training means or how they’d benefit from cross-cultural training.

Some skeptics might doubt that cross-cultural training is all that
important for a successful presentation abroad. Business is business,
right? ─ Wrong. To see how essential cross-cultural training is for a
company’s representative, let’s look at a hypothetical US American
sales manager speaking to an international audience without cross-
cultural training.

CROSS-CULTURAL TRAINING FOR PRESENTATIONS:
GENERAL TIPS

Our manager – let’s call her Caitlin – thought she’d done her
homework for a persuasive presentation despite foregoing cross-
cultural training. She had planned to attend a crash course on cross-
cultural training for international presentations, but had to skip it for
time reasons. Caitlin had delivered so many powerful lectures that it
couldn’t go wrong, cross-cultural training or not. She did follow
several time-honored rules for capturing an audience’s attention.
Caitlin didn’t need any cross-cultural training to know these key
aspects:

 Structure the presentation clearly.
 Make your beginning and ending as effective as possible. As a fan
of the New York Yankees, Caitlin likes opening her presentations
with allusions to the baseball team’s legendary successes.
 Make proper use of visual aids to underscore your point. Caitlin
doesn’t appreciate statistics cluttering her slides. So she decided to
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