August 2026 · Market guide · 8 min read

Doing Business in India: Seven Things Nobody Tells You

I spent two years based in India running international operations and completing an MBA there. Almost everything I had read about the market beforehand was either wrong or useless.

Agra, India

India is the market most often described in superlatives and least often described accurately. The population number gets quoted, the growth rate gets quoted, and then a foreign company arrives with a plan built for a country that does not exist.

I lived there for two years, ran operations between Türkiye and India, and did an MBA in Travel and Tourism at Amity University while doing it. Here is what I wish someone had told me on day one.

1. Business starts at the third meeting

The first meeting is about who you are. The second is about whether the first impression holds. The third is where business gets discussed properly.

Foreign visitors routinely treat meetings one and two as failures and either push too hard or write the account off. Both reactions cost you the deal. The early meetings are not preliminaries, they are the qualification process, run on their terms rather than yours.

Plan for it. If you are flying in for three days, do not book three separate first meetings and expect three pipelines. Book fewer accounts and go back.

2. Price sensitivity is not the same as wanting cheap

This is the most expensive misreading in the market.

Indian buyers negotiate hard, and foreign vendors conclude the market only wants the lowest price. What is actually being demanded is demonstrated value per rupee. The same buyer who spends an hour on your line items will happily pay a premium for something that visibly solves a problem, and will pay it again next year.

The wrong answer is to strip your offer down. The right answer is to make the value legible: show the numbers, show a comparable local example, and be willing to start smaller so the value can be proven rather than promised.

Amity University, India

3. India is several markets wearing one name

Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai do not behave alike, and the differences are commercial, not cosmetic.

Business style, language of preference, decision speed, relationship expectations and even what counts as an acceptable follow up cadence shift as you move. A partner who is excellent in the north may have no useful access in the south. Assuming national coverage from a single relationship is how foreign companies end up with a distributor who covers one city and a report that says they cover India.

Pick one region for your entry, exactly as you would pick one country in Europe.

4. The decision maker is rarely the person in front of you

Hierarchies are respected and often owner led. The person you are meeting may be genuinely enthusiastic and genuinely unable to approve anything.

This is not evasion, it is structure. The fix is the same as everywhere but more important here: ask early and without embarrassment who else needs to be involved, and offer to present to them directly. In my experience people are perfectly happy to arrange it. What they will not do is volunteer the information unprompted.

5. WhatsApp is the business channel

Email is where proposals go. WhatsApp is where business actually happens.

Foreign professionals often find this uncomfortable and keep everything in formal email, which reads as distance. Meanwhile the deal is being discussed in a chat you are not in. Being reachable and responsive on the informal channel is not unprofessional here, it is a signal that you are a real counterparty rather than a corporate address.

Same applies to speed. A reply within the hour on a small question builds more credibility than a beautifully formatted document three days later.

6. The contract is a milestone, not the relationship

A signed agreement in India marks the point at which the real negotiation about how things will work begins. That sounds cynical and it is not meant to be. Terms get revisited because circumstances change and because the relationship, not the document, is what both sides believe they are operating under.

If you treat every revisit as a breach, you will burn a lot of goodwill. If you treat it as ongoing maintenance of a live relationship, you will find the same flexibility works in your favour when you need it.

7. Festivals and the calendar run the year

Diwali is not a public holiday you route around, it is a season that reshapes commercial activity for weeks. Regional festivals matter enormously and vary by state. The financial year ends in March, which moves budget behaviour in ways a January to December planner will get wrong.

Build the calendar into the plan before you commit to a quarter target.

What builds trust faster than anything else

Show up in person. Come back. Remember what was said last time. Be reachable. Follow through on the small thing you promised in a conversation nobody wrote down.

Two years in, that is the entire summary. The market rewards presence and consistency more than polish, and it forgives almost anything except the sense that you are passing through.

India does not reward the best pitch. It rewards the person who came back.