The question I was asked most often was, “What do you do here?” or its variant, “What does your job entail?” It became so common that I developed an almost automatic response: “I run LaLiga’s operations in India.” Contrary to what many of my colleagues think, many well-educated, well-travelled, and world-wise Indians have no idea what LaLiga is. So I often had to clarify that “LaLiga is the professional football league in Spain, where Real Madrid, FC Barcelona, and Atlético de Madrid play.” This usually helped focus the rest of the answer as my interlocutor began to get a sense of who I worked for. I usually continued: “My job is to promote the LaLiga brand in India, to make it better known.” And if my interlocutor didn’t know us, I would follow up with: “The fact that you don’t know what LaLiga is confirms that we still have a lot of work to do.”
Sometimes, when I thought it appropriate, I elaborated further: “By promoting the brand, we seek to increase the number of fans who follow us.” What for? I asked myself rhetorically: To improve our commercial profile and increase revenue in the market, where does that revenue come from? Mainly from two sources: media rights (TV stations pay us to broadcast our games) and securing local brands as sponsors.
I then added: “It’s easy to say what we do, but explaining how we intend to achieve it is much more complex. It’s all about making noise as much as we can; to do that, we use all the means at our disposal: conventional and digital media, social networks, and events that allow us to connect directly with the fans, such as competitions, prizes, and the watch parties of top matches.”
“This is my job, and this is what we do,” I used to conclude. That’s what I dedicated myself to, body and soul, during my almost seven years in India.
When you arrive in a new country for work, the first thing you should do is try to understand how business is conducted. This is especially important when you are also entering a culturally very different territory. Indians have a well-deserved reputation for being difficult negotiators. They are indeed very good at negotiating and are clear about what they want to get.
I believe that to do business in India, you need to be clear about a few key issues, which, in my opinion, can be summed up in three:
First, as that friend told me, in India, you have to have a lot of patience.
Second, you have to understand that you don’t sell to an Indian; the Indian buys from you. It may seem the same, but it is not.
And third, it is all about building and maintaining trusting relationships.
The first thing to remember is that our interlocutor will probably have a strong negotiation instinct; most likely, he’ll be a Marwari, Bania, Parsi, Sindhi… in other words, he will belong to one of India’s traditional trading communities. It doesn’t matter if he is a billionaire now; when it comes to negotiating, he will fight for every rupee with the same spirit and mindset as his grandfather did in the small shop in Lahore or Surat, where he began the family business.
We must recognise that Indian society is a communal society, and individuals tend to do business with others from their community: Marwaris with Marwaris, Banias with Banias, Gujaratis with Gujaratis, and so forth. This is not to suggest that business cannot be conducted outside their community, but it will rarely be their first preference. Therefore, it is crucial to earn their trust and respect, which generally takes time.
This brings us to one of the first common mistakes made when trying to enter the market: relying on an Indian who has been successful abroad, usually in the US, UK, or Dubai, and who has “guaranteed” to open India’s doors. If we choose this route, the person who was supposed to open the doors for us will likely require a substantial investment or an equity stake in our company, and ultimately, we may receive nothing in return. The communal nature of society explains this again. If Indian society is very insular, so is the market. Those who truly “control” the market are often willing to do business with a foreigner, but they “hate” their compatriots who have succeeded abroad and want to return to the country to, in their view, give them lessons on how to do things. Of course, this is unless they are “one of their own,” as they increasingly educate their children at top European and American universities, often beginning their careers outside India before returning to the family business.
Once we get down to business, we will meet some incredibly polite yet secretive potential business partners. As with society in general, they are wonderful hosts – friendly, curious, attentive, and proud. Beyond the certainty that they will offer you a good masala chai, the meeting will be of international standards. I recall one with the owners of a major cosmetics firm that lasted over an hour. 90% of the time, we talked about anything and everything: football, cricket, polo, women, television, and so on. Only in the last few minutes did we discuss the reason for our meeting. We did not reach any conclusions.
This is what you need to be ready for. No matter how you feel when leaving the meeting, the outcome is usually positive. You won’t know if it went well or badly for a few days. If they are not interested in your proposal, they will ignore you; they won’t answer emails or calls; they will never tell you “no” outright; their “no” answer is their way of doing it. Conversely, if they are interested in the business, they will be persistent, always chasing you to close the deal as soon as possible. It is true that in India, you must be patient, even though Indians can be incredibly impatient.
This highlights another common mistake when doing business in the subcontinent: believing you control the timing. I have seen deals that were progressing well fall apart because the foreigners thought they had authority over the timing. That initial rush from your potential partner may stem from some “political” interest beyond your influence and not understanding this can ruin the negotiation. Does completing the process as quickly as they request mean the deal will succeed? Not at all. The deal can fail for many reasons, but if you don't adhere to the timeline set by your Indian partner, it is unlikely to work.
In any case, India is not a country of “absolutes”; there is almost always room for negotiation or for finding an imaginative compromise, which also needs to be taken into account. This brings us to another important point: you cannot approach a negotiation in India with rigid positions. You must remember that you are in a place where everything is quite fluid. Just as in India, there is no single god, there is no single truth or possibility.
You must always be prepared to navigate chaos; if you embrace it, it can, to some extent, be enjoyable and, of course, manageable. Chaos influences everything in your daily life, including how you interact with your cleaner, taxi driver, or colleagues. I can be quite temperamental when things aren’t going well, and the team often managed to get on my nerves. I guess it wasn’t pleasant, not for me either, to see me shouting. When I would calm down, I would say something like this: “You guys seem to get off on me going ‘girl from The Exorcist mode’. You know me well; you know how to fool me, and yet you don’t seem to feel like doing things until you're shouted at.”
The truth is that, despite the chaos, things ultimately work out and work right. Edward Luce wrote that India functions like a swarm of bees. If you put a camera inside, you can’t make sense of what you see: the bees seem to fly in all directions without any order; chaos reigns. However, when you zoom out to gain an overall perspective, you see that the swarm somehow functions as a coherent formation, all moving in the same direction.
So, I would not despise the chaos that permeates almost everything in India. Indeed, perhaps we should simply accept it and not try to change it. After all, we live in a world where chaos often prevails over order, so it is probably the right thing to do to learn how to navigate in the midst of confusion. Not only that, but it is possible that the “Indian way” is more appropriate than the Western way to navigate a reality in which order and norms are increasingly challenged, if not disappearing.
When you sit down to negotiate in India, it is crucial to be aware that the other side has its own agenda. We all do, but here, it assumes its distinct characteristics. The other side has probably not bothered to know what you want to get out of the negotiation. When negotiating, it is essential to have as much information as possible about what the other side is looking for, what they want, and what they can offer, which gives you an idea of how far you can push them. This seems unimportant in India, where people go about their business without the slightest concern for where you stand. I have often found myself in situations where someone wanted to sell me their product without having the slightest idea if it was something I needed or if it was of any use to LaLiga. I was left with the impression that all they knew was that LaLiga is a Spanish entity associated with football and, more importantly, has a substantial amount of money. And if LaLiga has a lot of money, why shouldn’t it give some to me?
Excerpted with permission from Breaking Into Cricketland: A Spanish Executive’s Attempt to Sell Football in India, José Antonio Cachaza, TWAGAA International.
