Meeting a government official for a software product pitch.

The vagaries of the Indian bureaucracy.

If you have never tried to pitch an American software company’s product to a harassed IT official, then you are in for an experience that can bedevil the mind.

First, you must ensure your local sales team can get you an appointment. Appointments with decision-making officials are like the Holy Grail.

Once it is set up, you then arrive promptly with your American colleague to call on the official.

We make our way to the official’s closed-door office, where we are solicitously received and provided with coffee, tea, or water as needed. Declining is bad form. 

Accepting any refreshment offered is a good-faith gesture. In some customer offices, the customer will wait for you to drink first before he does. So be sensitive to that if you are offered a drink. 

It is a 30-minute meeting.

So we quickly make the introductions, exchange smiles all around, and with permission, we open our laptops to begin our presentation.

My visiting American colleague proceeds first.

Five minutes in, with a lot of nodding from the senior department official, we presented the context and the first slide. 

The phone rings.

The official immediately becomes deferential. It is the secretary or assistant of his boss.

Her voice comes through loudly in the confines of the closed-door office.

She asks if the official has received an email from an external vendor who is scheduled to meet the boss.

This leads to vigorous nodding and saying yes by the official, and then reconfirming that by opening his email which we patiently observe, and checking he has received it. 

He then clicks on the attachment and opens the vendor’s presentation.

He confirms to her. She wants to know — since the boss wants to know — whether he plans to attend that meeting that morning or later in the afternoon.

He says, “Yes, madam, I will.”

She is not satisfied with that answer. She again asks for confirmation.

He gets even more enthusiastic in his response. “Yes, yes, yes. I will be there.”

We look at each other. He looks at us apologetically. We smile. It is after all, only a short 2-minute interruption and this is a Holy Grail appointment.

He hangs up the call, pages through the presentation in the email, and then turns to us. He is feeling the pressure of us being in the room.

He apologizes, and my colleague resumes his presentation.

A few slides in, the phone rings again.

The same lady now is calling with additional info on the meeting. Mr. So and So will also be there. But the boss wants this official’s presence without fail. Will he be there? She again wants his confirmation.

Now the stakes have risen on that meeting.

The official again profusely explains that he intends to be there. He has seen the presentation. For good measure, he reopens the same email and the same presentation and thumbs through the slides in front of us. 

Somehow, he hopes that this will convey the urgency of his action to the caller on the phone. But it can’t. 

So, he tells her he is reviewing the presentation again. He explains some nuances of the presentation for the benefit of the lady. He then reconfirms he fully intends to be there.

The lady does not ask whether he is busy, has visitors, or has a conflict. She expects his deference.

Her sole intent is to ensure her boss is satisfied with the question of whether the IT expert department head can be in the meeting that someone else has committed to the boss.

This takes 10 minutes. My colleague is now getting impatient.

I try to get the official back on track after he hangs up the phone. The official is apologetic. I then raise a business point and ask his view. He presents a 10,000-foot perspective. We try to get his attention back to how our product can help solve some of his department’s issues.

He nods, agrees, and listens. A minute later, he returns to his computer to view the slides. He is distracted.

Then, he returns to our slides we are sharing on the laptop.

He nods listens, and agrees.

The phone rings again. It is the same lady. She again wants a re-confirmation because additional people have been added to this meeting and its weightage has gone up.

She wants the official to know he is super critical to its success, and he has to be there after reviewing the vendor’s slide deck.

He politely reassures her, and through her, asks to reassure his boss that he intends to be at that meeting fully prepared.

It is now 25 minutes into our allotted time. We have only 5 minutes left. We have barely covered our deck and never discussed intent to purchase or validate a pilot or a next meeting. We look at each other ruefully. 

I wonder why the sales team that set up this meeting is not in the room. I was playing the role of smoothening the process, managing the official, managing our presentation, and ensuring we at least had a passable visit. 

On the dot of 30 minutes, the official thanks us. He explains the bad timing and apologizes again. He is feeling hassled too. Implicitly, I understand — it is a question of his job security, promotion and perks. We nod, thank him though my colleague is barely containing his annoyance. This usually doesn’t happen in the USA as I well know.

I adopted a more laissez-faire attitude after spending 5 years in India and concluding that this is the culture. 

Did the official lack the freedom, or did he choose not to inquire if he could instruct the assistant to hold his calls until our meeting concluded?

Authority drives compliance everywhere in India.

Though he was a polite man, a kind official, an IT expert, and understood the domain, he was disempowered in the hierarchy and lacked the discretion to manage his schedule and responsibilities.

I wonder how that vendor was able to secure a meeting with the boss for whom our meeting got disrupted.

We sometimes forget in the private business world we inhabit, that IT technologists in the public sector succeed against all odds in their environments. Their day-to-day actions are driven by external forces unrelated to their outcomes but necessary for their survival in the job.

Decision-makers in government are subject to the vagaries of the bureaucracy. Their time is owned by their bosses, and objectives and agendas are enabled as long as they sync with their boss’s agendas. Pleasing the boss is a basic criterion of the job.

It is also a diplomat’s job. Not everyone can succeed.

We left the office and blew off steam outside. 

We had known beforehand that this was a courtesy meeting but we didn’t expect that we would not even have the opportunity to pitch and understand their problems. We realize that our sales team had not qualified this sufficiently.

But, sometimes in India, sales teams know that these meetings are to simply to establish credibility, and trust with the Indian officials. A show of faith that senior business leaders are extremely interested in doing business. 

This official was an expert and a decision-maker. The meeting would have been fruitful both ways even if we were to just exchange points of view. Both sides had lost.

These are the small, persistent inefficiencies that drive a lot of the processes for business meetings in India. Interruptions, authority-driven asks, disruptions, last-minute changes to meeting times, agendas, and goals. A lack of commitment to a process that works for both sides.

To circumvent these non-standard ways, the trick is to influence at the highest levels first, where arbitrary logistical calls don’t derail the conversation. Everything else follows from that. 

Of course, at the top, there is always someone else to answer to but if you get high enough, there will be more discretion and more people supporting the process.