S03E16: Language Service Provider (LSP) Sales Team Structure

Thomas Edwards

Thanks, Sultan. I’m very well. Thank you so much.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I’m so happy to hear that. Thomas, I know you. You are an industry veteran and quite well known, but for those folks who haven’t heard of you or they are new to the industry, please give us a brief introduction of yourself and what you do.

 

Thomas Edwards

So, I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years and I kind of fell in this industry by accident like so many of us. My background is quite international. I have three citizenships by birth, French, Swiss and American. I grew up as a French kid in France, served in the French army and then eventually ended up in America where I was a student at UC Berkeley and needed to pay my rent one day. So I said, what can I do? And I decided to do translation and that’s how I got into this industry. And then later I joined the industry on the client side and eventually on the services side as an operations person and salesperson.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That’s a very interesting, colorful, unique background that you have. But let’s talk about your start. You say that the circumstances kind of shape things up for you to join this industry. Tell me about that. I don’t know the story, but I want you to share with the podcast audience how did you start? How was it?

 

Thomas Edwards

Yeah, so it actually was quite tough because as I was a freelance translator, I started looking at, I had no experience. I had done a little bit of interpreting in the French army in Berlin, working with the English forces and the American forces as part of the French army. However, as far as a translator, I had very little experience. So I ended up, the biggest challenge for me was to find clients. I had a revenue that was ebbing and flowing. So sometimes I had too many projects that I needed to perform as a translator. And it was quite stressful because I was a full time student at the same time. And sometimes I would have these lull in revenue and I didn’t even know how to sell myself, how to go out and find business for myself as a linguist. So that was, I think, the most challenging part as a freelance translator. And then some agencies had a tendency to give me very low rates. So I had to kind of constantly fight for rates or negotiate rates or decide not to work with certain agencies.

 

And so eventually I found that working on the client side was better paid. So I ended up doing translations for a Mac utility software company doing print queue management and formatting software for hard drives when they were upgraded from a Mac, let’s say a 20 meg to a 40 meg SCSI hard drive that was put in an enclosure and needed some software to run it. It was much better paid. But then I aspired to a bit more in having more exposure to other languages than just French. And one day I was asked, hey, could you manage a German translation project? And how about a Japanese one? And that’s how I moved into project management in addition to being a linguist. And eventually found a job at International Language Engineering in Boulder, Colorado, which was one of the first ISO certified agencies in the industry. And yeah, ended up working for Microsoft, mainly Microsoft projects, double byte projects for the home market in Japan, as well as Octel on large systems administrator manuals in multi languages, thousands of pages to localize. That’s how I started as a project manager on the services side.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, you’ve seen it all basically, you’ve been in so many different roles that nothing is new or unique or surprising to you?

 

Thomas Edwards

Well, I think there’s plenty of new developments all the time in our industry. It’s quite a quite an interesting industry, I have to say.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

We heard about that. Thomas, I’m interested to hear a few words from you about your journey. What have you seen along the way that stood out to you as significant as important that, things that you always think about and in a way evolved, not just the industry, but you as a person too?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think when I was a project manager, and eventually an account manager and a salesperson dealing mainly with IT companies in the Silicon Valley in California, what I noticed was there was this cycle of two years that corresponded to the release typically of a Windows update, a major Windows update every two years. And what you would have is you would have a spike in business shortly after, shortly before, right before and after a new release of Windows, which impacted a lot of the partner companies that develop software or hardware on the Windows platform for PCs. And this spike was, you could almost predict it. And it was a, it was a phenomenon that really affected our language industry for many years and still does to some extent. The other one that I noticed is that in about 25 to 30 years, the word rates have not really changed much, even though the cost of living at the same time has increased drastically, something like 200 or 300% in cost of living, word rates have not modified by more than five or 10% since I started.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And that’s a major concern because obviously our industry is not keeping up with inflation, cost of living and so forth. And I know that there are conversations, people are talking about it, about justifying how our costs have gone up, all our suppliers have to be paid more and our overhead is costing us a little bit more, technology is costing us more. So, do you see any shift happening in that front?

 

Thomas Edwards

Well, everybody, so many people are complaining about this and have been complaining for years, arguing with the linguists that the word rates are too low, but also the LSPs, small, medium or large alike. The truth of the matter is we are our worst own enemies in this industry because we keep on agreeing to sell to end clients at the word rate level. Yet from when I started to now, in addition to the word rate, let’s say 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, we charged for project preparation, we charge for DTP, we charge for engineering, we charge for final QA, we had all these and project management, we charge 5 to 15% in project management in addition to the word rate. And unfortunately, what has happened is because of competition, companies now are just eliminating from their quotes a lot of these additional tasks, focusing on the word rate, yet not increasing that word rate to the end client. And by doing that, we are clearly putting ourselves in a commodity realm where clients see us as the same as buying a bag of peanuts sometimes, as opposed to the professional, very technical and very challenging industry that we are.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And given, as you said, this is a knowledge industry, there are skills involved, there’s training involved, yet there is a race to the bottom and commoditizing it.

 

Thomas Edwards

And part of the problem might be because there’s always a smaller company in a region that’s willing to sell and undercut the word rate, which keeps those word rates at a low level. The other one is I think we are not, as service providers, we are not doing a service to our clients or to our linguists or to our companies or team members because we are not educating the customer as to why it’s important to have higher word rates and be paid a fair wage for this very knowledge intensive and technology intensive, requiring a lot of investment, as you mentioned, Sultan. We’re just not educating the customers enough.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That’s good stuff. But today I’ve invited you, Thomas, to talk about and share your wisdom and experience in the area of sales. So, this is going to be a bit of a masterclass for sale directors of sales and LSPs, managers. Please share a few words about how sales is executed in the language industry today. And we’ll drill deeper into all these issues and opportunities and so forth. But give me a high level bird’s eye view of how sales is done today.

 

Thomas Edwards

So first, I think it’s important to realize there’s really two different types of LSPs. Language service providers, translation companies. On the one hand, you have the very large players that have grown by acquisition sometimes and also organically and have really figured out everything. So, they have professional sales teams. They have been fully trained. They have sales management. They have technology helping sales and the like. And then you have smaller to medium sized LSPs that often case evolved from having a founder who was the managing director of the company and also its main salesperson. Because of that, that owner has had such an important role in the sales process. And it has caused challenges in hiring staff that may not feel that they have the power or the autonomy to be able to showcase their skill at the highest level. Just because you have this owner that typically or owners that typically watch the company with an eagle eye.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood. Thomas, let’s dive deeper. And so you mentioned about the leadership, how they can actually affect how sales is done. But let’s talk about the structure of sales teams in our industry. What’s the form? What’s typically, what does a sales team look like in an LSP?

 

Thomas Edwards

So, what would I’ll give the end to the answer before the beginning. There’s a missing link in our industry often case, which is the strategic account management team or the account management team. What we have is we have very well-organized operations, project management, engineering, linguists, etc. And then we have fairly well-organized sales teams with a sales director typically. Then you’ll have if the LSP does business in different regions, you’ll have, let’s say a BDM or BDD business development manager, business development director in different regions. And then what is lacking is the account management team that can take over from sales a new piece of business and maintain and grow that account, freeing up the time of the salespeople to remain hunters as opposed as to falling in the trap of becoming only farmers. Therefore, no more bringing, let’s say, new leads and fresh accounts into the organization. And that is a challenge of the current structure of the LSP in many cases.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In order to get a hunter, you just pointed to the fact that hunters obviously go and find new customers and then you have account managers which are akin to farmers basically. They have to continue business from existing clients. What are some of the basic qualifications for a salesperson, a hunter that could thrive in an LSP?

 

Thomas Edwards

So, there is a rumor in our industry that cold calling is dead, that people don’t need to cold call anymore. They don’t need to pick up the phone. Everything is done via LinkedIn messaging or sending mass emails or eventually meeting people and leads at a trade show in person. However, that is incorrect. A true salesperson and the quality of a true successful salesperson is the ability to prospect, to find leads and to do outreach. Whatever works best for that salesperson. Some people prefer to call, use the phone or zoom or similar tools. Some people don’t prefer this and they are very good at making an approach via let’s say written media. It’s a choice, however let’s not forget that ultimately a good salesperson and that’s what their quality should be primarily is somebody who will do outreach, who will understand that he or she will need to remain a farmer, bring leads and not just wait for marketing or the website to bring them leads.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood. So basically, a salesperson’s job is to sell essentially. That’s what the role says. However, some of us make that complicated by adding all kinds of acronyms to it and putting technology which all of those should be secondary to what they’re doing. They should basically be essentially able to explain what their service is and sell it to someone.

 

Thomas Edwards

That’s it and this is why it is sometimes challenging for senior experienced salespeople from outside of our industry to be able to sell interpreting or translation services at a high level because they lack that understanding of our fairly complex industry in order to sell it effectively.

 

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas besides the competence and social skills such as making cold calls and connecting with people and going to events, trade shows, what else does a salesperson in this industry need to know beyond a typical salesperson’s knowledge or skill level so that they can with confidence portray what we are selling and you know get the customer to buy into that?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think one of the challenges of salespeople is that sometimes they come from the industry, they were in operations like me for example but often cases they haven’t and so yes, they’re very good salespeople but they may be lacking a certain understanding of how a project works and you know there are a few things we can do to train them in understanding what our business is about so they can sell it effectively to prospects and clients alike. However, we sometimes do not invest in the salespeople, we sometimes just set them free and say okay go sell with no clear direction or no clear training that will enable them to be successful.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood so basically keeping them up to date, training them on the basic and essential skills and also telling them about what our industry is about beyond just you know these are the tools we are using or the processes are like we do translation, edit and review, we do salesperson need to know about things like how translation is done and to be able to explain that because I’ve seen that personally there’s a lot of people who cannot explain that.

 

Thomas Edwards

Yeah, I think that the good salesperson who brings the numbers in has a fairly good grasp of what a localization project entails or an interpreting engagement if that’s the case and there’s an easy way to train that salesperson in that type of understanding and that’s just doing a boot camp at your company, putting that sales new salesperson in the role of a proofreader, a desktop publisher, an engineer, a tester, a project coordinator, a recruiter, project manager, assigning maybe even some live projects that don’t have a you know very tight schedule that could be supervised by a senior project manager, have them shadow an operations team and be part of that team for let’s say a couple of weeks when they first start and then they will get a fairly good understanding of what it entails to do this project and then you can set them free and go hunt.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thank you Thomas, let’s shift gears here and talk about where the sales team fits inside an LSP organization. The book that I read from Renato Beninatto, my friend, it says that there’s three key essential components or core components of an LSP is sales, vendor management and obviously project management. So, what other teams interact with sales and how should that interface be set up?

 

Thomas Edwards

Yeah I think the thing that is often lacking in our companies is a collaborative tool, it’s a way to collaborate between the different departments and one tool that is a great tool to collaborate is a CRM, a client relationship manager software, it’s basically a database with also a workflow that will enable an opportunity to be tracked based on its stages and then what it also does, it’s a forum for project managers and management alike to see what the sales person is doing, the interactions they’re having and possibly participate in this as they themselves may have contacts with a client. It’s a way to consolidate in one place all the information about a particular prospect or client. It also is a tool that enables the sales team to showcase their pipeline, what they’re working on. Often there’s a doubt that the sales people are actually doing work, they’re out there having fancy dinners sometimes with clients, going on business trips in some cases and one wonders what are they actually doing those sales folks. So having a CRM that can showcase the actual hard work that sales is, is a key to a good understanding of the three different components or even more components of a translation company. And lastly, what a collaborative tool like this enables is to convert a pipeline with a weighing factor of opportunities in a CRM to an actual forecast that then operations and management can take to the bank and make hiring and firing decision based on that forecast.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

There is this notion in our industry, I’ve heard it in so many conferences, that sales people do not stick around for long with LSPs. Is it true and if so, why is that?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think I’m going to paraphrase Renato Beninatto here because I think he has a good expression. It’s not exactly the one that I’m going to use, but it’s the gist of it, which is “bad hire quick fire.” And that’s unfortunately the reality is that the ones who don’t stick around much are typically not the very good ones. The sales people who succeed, who understand a company, who have loyalty to a company, who bring results will typically stick around. I was talking at LocWorld a few weeks ago with one of my former colleagues from Welocalize who has been with that company for over 15 years as just a regular business development manager with no aspirations to be a manager or VP. He’s very content with his work. He’s proud of his work. He’s proud to be a salesperson, to do the outreach, to do the right thing, get some commission money and really overall be happy with his position. And so that is somebody who sticks around for the long term, really basically. So I think another aspect to this might be that in order to stick around, a salesperson also, it’s not just about money. They need to feel appreciated. They need to feel appreciated by their boss. They need to feel appreciated by their colleagues. So a pat in the back to a salesperson who has done a good job goes a long way to keeping their loyalty and keeping them around.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Just like anything, I guess we constantly need to refresh and rejuvenate our sales training to be up to speed with what’s happening in our industry, with the client industries and so forth. This is an area where you provide expertise. And I’ve personally been a beneficiary of your expertise and I see that and I can attest to that. Now tell me, how should LSPs plan and budget for uplifting or rejuvenating their sales skills?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think regular sales skills training are important. I used to work with a salesperson who had a habit when he was on business trips to purchase a sales training book. The latest sales method. And he would read this on airplanes and in airports or whenever he had time during his travels and I noticed an uptick in his sales results every time he read such a book. And he would read one maybe once every three months. So, his sales would go down, down, down. He would buy the latest and greatest and then his sales would go up. We like everybody, like an athlete, we need to do training. We need to be constantly refreshing our set of skills and sometimes be reminded of what’s important. But we don’t need to necessarily hire a consultant to do this. We can also do it on our own if we don’t have the budget. And that is, like we said before, getting a tool like a CRM that will help the sales team also creating a yearly retreat perhaps where we could have operations and sales meet together and understand each other’s challenges and aspirations and goals and then collectively work on a company strategy to, let’s say, increase business in an organized fashion is very useful. Another one is the sales boot camp, just making sure that your sales are properly trained. And one thing that is very important and often forgotten is to provide them with a target, an actual target or quota as it’s called or a budget. Some people prefer to use, but a target that they can aim for and know what the expectations of their organization and management is with regards to their own personal results. Otherwise, they just become butterflies going from one flower to the next because they don’t really have a goal. And often in our industry I find that if we give our salespeople training, either internal or external, and if we let them once in a while have a attend trade shows so they can mix with other industry folks, and finally if we give them a clear quota then they will succeed. If we don’t have that quota, they will not.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

I know you talked about the kind of skills that a salesperson needs, but let’s talk about the skills, the talents and kind of the know-how or education I guess you would call it that a sales manager, a person managing a sales team must possess to manage a robust sales team that constantly brings in revenue and meets your KPIs or targets.

 

Thomas Edwards

I know this is going to surprise people because I’m going to say that actually a sales manager does not necessarily need to be an excellent salesperson, but needs to be an excellent manager of people. And that is the number one set for a sales manager. Much more important than being able to make a cold call or perform sales himself or herself, they need to empower the sales team to succeed. They need to understand that you need to keep your hunters, hunters and your farmers, farmers. They need to set the goals, set the targets accurately with the sales people reviewing that target with them, typically in the last quarter of the year before the new year starts. It’s a good habit of sitting as a sales manager with your sales staff and agreeing on a common target number for the next year. And lastly, I think it’s to be a participative manager where in some cases the salesperson may need that little additional support to close a piece of business and be there if they need that.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And what about the role of technology Thomas, to enable sales teams to perform better? I mean, it’s possible to sell without any technology, although some people might argue, for example, if I’m put face to face with someone, I might still be able to convince them to buy my product. But what does technology do for us and how do we use it properly to enable sales teams to perform at their best?

 

Thomas Edwards

You know, I think you can build a chair just using a Swiss Army knife, but it sure is easier if you have machinery. So, it’s the same with sales. There is a level of technology that we need to invest in. It is not a very large investment, because if we look at the cost of a CRM, a customer relationship manager software, to manage the sales effort and give that, it’s a primary tool for salespeople. The CRM is the number one primary tool. And you can start with some companies like HubSpot or Zoho for free. They will give you free packages to start and then as soon as you get like 500 or 1000 contacts in there, then you buy upgrades, five packages, 5000 contacts, etc. And you can spell a lot of money using, you know, full fledged CRMs like Salesforce, for example. But you can start small, it doesn’t need to cost a lot of money. But this CRM is the essential technology that you need for your Salesforce. The second one is the ability to perhaps get a membership of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That is a little bit expensive on a monthly basis. But you can also just get one for your entire team, maybe have the sales manager have access to it. And just, you know, answer a couple of questions from his sales staff that may occur. If you have the budget, get their own Sales Navigator membership. It’s a few, I can’t remember exactly the cost, but it’s a little shy of $100 US to get that membership on a monthly basis. It’s well worth it, because it gives you access to certain tools to identify prospect lists. It gives you a sheer number of in-mail messages that you can send on LinkedIn that will enable your salespeople to reach out to many prospects. And I think the last investment we can make is, to some extent, technology but not really. And that is empowering a salesperson to occasionally go to an industry event to hear and learn about the latest technologies and what is going on out there, be able to share with colleagues in the industry at different levels in management, sales or not, is an investment well worth it.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas, you know, the past couple of years has been strange. It’s been, I guess, expected and unexpected in so many ways with the pandemic and work from home. We knew the technology would, at some point, reach to a point where we will be able to do things remotely. Now, the nature of approaching people and selling to them has changed as well. The customers expect things to be done differently, and I guess we also do it differently. How should sales teams adapt to this new reality?

 

Thomas Edwards

The truth that matters, there’s always going to be a crisis. We’ve seen many crises over the past few years. Remember September 11th, 2001, remember 2008, 2009, the financial crisis, COVID, the war in Ukraine, there will always be a crisis. But I think when we work within crises environments or when we have to work remotely, we have to understand that we have to become in sales even better listeners to our customers. We have to, instead of, I like to use the term, it’s a little bit crass, I apologize for the audience, but we have a tendency to “vomit” our elevator pitch to a prospect, and that is no longer the way to do it. The way to do it is today to research a common point of contact that we can have with a prospect or a client, something that we can discuss, one of their pain points. And one of the ways, the best ways to do it is to do your homework as a salesperson and your research, but also to be a great listener. We have to show empathy. We have to understand that most of us on this planet by now have been affected by a crisis, one or the other, and realize that and actually have a bit of a more warming up to a sales call where we start asking people how they are, ask them if they have been impacted by the latest crisis or not, and just establish a personal relationship also as opposed to just going out and charging, charging, charging, and selling, selling, selling, which does not get a very good response today.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas, I would like us to zoom out and take a look at our industry at a high level. I know you talked about this at the very beginning, but what is the main problem when it comes to selling and winning customer trust today versus before?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think if I were to just give one answer to this, it would be that we are perceived still as a commodity as opposed to a professional service. And that is the biggest challenge is for a salesperson to be able to get out of that commodity rut and be able to showcase the solutions that we can provide as solution providers.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Do you think, Thomas, that as an industry, we’re doing a good job in educating our customers about what we do so that our sales teams could leverage that knowledge and that foundation and offer solutions that are relevant and fit to customers’ problems? You alluded to this earlier that there’s a price war going on right now and we are failing to educate them, but what else could we be doing collectively?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think collectively what is very important in this education of prospects and customers alike is to have communication with them. So, the industry events like Gala, Locworld, Elia, ALC, etc., where you can have clients and vendors, should use a supplier, that’s a better term for what we do than vendor, that meet and learn from each other is key. Also, I think podcasts like yours, Sultan, that educate the industry at large and clients on the issues surrounding this industry that often case they are involved with if they are a global company, are key in order to get out of this perception of this commodity-only, bags of peanuts type of industry.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas, you offer your expertise and training sales teams within LSPs, large and small. Do enough of us, I mean the LSP side, take advantage of what you are offering in terms of that knowledge, that experience and expertise and resources that are available to improve our sales outcomes, do you think enough people are taking things like this seriously in order to grow their businesses? Because at the end of the day, business is about selling and if you don’t know what is going on in the real world, if an expert is not showing you the right tricks, then you are probably not doing a good job in what you are doing, just like going to school for a trade. If you haven’t studied it properly, you will not be good at it. What type of trends do you see?

 

Thomas Edwards

What I see is that there is a lot of training in the industry about selling and the training that I see out there is very theoretical and I mean there are plenty of good solutions and there are plenty of good trainers in this industry but there are plenty of bad ones as well and one thing that my partner and I like to do, my partner is Jessica Rathke with FluentSales, the organization called FluentSales, is we provide a duality of theoretical training followed by a tactical hand-holding of the teams until they are ready to fly on their own or swim on their own and bring the numbers. So, I think one thing I would look for and that’s not me and Jessica but in any training that you look for in us or others is to look at this duality of skill set where we can provide training but also tactical hand-holding and maybe even introductions to prospects and possibly making cold calls on our own in order to help the sales team understand how it’s done.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas, most LSPs still operate with the same notion and dated mentality that we offer unique solutions and our customers will always buy from us. I know we’re talking about team and sales structure here but this also kind of fits there. What do you have to tell them in order to stay ahead of the competition? How should they structure their thoughts? How should they structure their offering?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think one thing that is fairly easy to do that we tend to forget as an industry and operations teams or account management teams is to keep regular interaction with our key customers and I’m not saying every customer if you have 2,000 customers you don’t want to invest too much time in some of them that don’t have a lot of potential but if you narrow this down to your strategic account or your important house accounts then these are worth the investment in regular business reviews, interaction, review of KPIs, key performance indicators with them on a regular basis. One common one that I like is the QBR, the quarterly business review, meet every three months with your customer. Some customers may prefer to meet every six months or even every year for an annual business review.

 

No matter, it doesn’t matter what the frequency is as long as you keep a regular contact with them. In today’s day and age, I think a Teams meeting or a Zoom meeting or a Skype meeting is very appropriate. An in-person meeting is possible if the clients are not too far away geographically from you but this regular communication where you sit down, you review KPIs, you review volumes, you review the history of relationship that you have with them, you remind them because in some cases you’ll have a long old timer on the client who will retire or leave the company and then a new person comes in and doesn’t know the history that you have with this organization and how much you have provided custom work and very flexible solutions to that client. And then when that happens, they may have allegiance with other vendors and guess what? You get fired.

 

So, in order not to get fired, in order to keep that business and grow that business, regularly sitting down with a client outside of the day-to-day interaction with messaging or email or even phone calls, but sitting down and looking at what worked well, what could be improved in the future on both sides and then review forecast for planning purposes in the next three months, six months, one year, five years is key to maintaining that customer and not having it snatched under you.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Speaking of competition and people taking over customer, do you see competition from within the industry? Is that where the threat is? How should sales teams compete with forces that are actually outside of the industry such as empty platforms coming in from Google or Amazon and so on? How do you see the future in terms of competition shaping up and how should LSPs prepare their sales teams to meet with all these different threats?

 

Thomas Edwards

So here again, like we said earlier, there’s really, I think, a difference in angles between the large LSPs and the small to medium sized LSPs. Let me explain. What happens and what has been happening for the past 20, 25 years or more in this industry is we will get some key revolutionary technology that will enable us to maximize profit and do more efficient work basically. And we had translation memory way back when, then we had rules-based machine translation, we had statistical-based machine translation, neural-based machine translation, and then combinations of translation memory, machine translation, and human editors, post-edited machine translation and the like. And these follow these kind of cycles.

 

Every five, six, seven years, you have this new technology that is usually adopted quite quickly by the large players because they can invest, they have the money to invest in these technologies. And what they end up doing is for a few years, they maximize their profit, they regain a few points in profit margin, whereas the smaller to medium sized organization that has not invested yet in this newer technology is losing traction, making projects more expensive, competing even in a harder way with those big competitors that have invested in technology, and in a way losing traction until they can again move to that technology. So, I think we should not fight technology, it will happen. We should not fight the Googles and the Amazons and the new technology of the world. Instead, let’s educate ourselves and just keep up. At the same time, understand that our business is a people business, and that translation will always be powered by people.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

That’s an amazing answer, and I really like that how you say that it’s the people that’s powering this industry and we don’t appreciate them enough. Let’s talk about the future, how things are going to look like in the next couple of years. How do you see sales teams changing, Thomas, and how do you see them adapting in the next 12 to 24 months with the world around us shifting and adjusting to a new socioeconomic environment? The horizon looks very different.

 

Thomas Edwards

At the same time, the more things change, the more things do not change. And as far as sales is concerned, having a sound sales strategy, an actual strategy where as a team you discuss which vertical markets, which industry segments you are experts at and should focus on in order to grow your business by showcasing your experience, deciding on which regions you want to penetrate or focus on, what services and service lines you want to offer, all those are key in order for your sales team to remain active and remain successful.

 

And so, when I say things change but they don’t change, you will always need to have a sales force that will provide prospecting and outreach, who will need to organize their effort, who will need to document, work collaboratively with operations without that tension that we see sometimes, making an effort to include operations in the final sales cycle when a deal is agreed to with a customer in order for it to go smoothly. All those things have been like this for the past 10, 15 years and will remain so. Even though things are shifting and there are changes, the fundamentals of our business do not change.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Thomas, as we reach the end of this conversation, hopefully we will continue to have this in the future. Can you share a few words of advice for LSP executives that are thinking about improving sales and business development in general?

 

Thomas Edwards

I think one thing that the biggest thing you can do to improve sales is to look at your current team. In some cases, there might be a salesperson who would benefit from having another position within the organization and maybe could be trained and reassigned to perhaps an operations position, a marketing position where they may have higher strength or to eliminate that position because we have a tendency as sales managers to really hope that a salesperson after three months, six months, nine months, twelve months of investment will bring results. If you don’t see results in the first three months of hire of a salesperson, you will not see better improvements six months, nine months down the line. You need to see activity levels that are necessary in order to book the business.

 

Today, you need 300% pipeline value for 100% forecast value in business development, which means that if you intend to book $100,000 of business, you need to have $300,000 of pipeline business you’re working on in order for that $100,000 to occur. And in order to do that, you can’t just have one opportunity per week or one opportunity per month you’re working on. You need to have an active sales team that will make 10, 20, 30 outreach efforts per day in order to juggle enough balls in the air that they will meet their targets and ultimately the company’s target.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wow, what a fascinating and engaging conversation, Thomas. But also, I had a lot of fun covering a subject that is so important and a fundamental part of business for all language services entrepreneurs and executives. I have to say that the value in your work is priceless and I’m so happy that your company FluentSales has been a partner of my organization Hybrid Lynx. I hope we can cover other sales related topics in the future. And with that, I want to thank you for your time and for sharing your experience with me in the industry.

 

Thomas Edwards

Thank you, Sultan. It’s much appreciated.

 

Conclusion:

Sales and sales management are fundamental to any business regardless of the industry. In the translation and localization industry, there is a major gap in what clients want and what is sold to them. In particular, in language suppliers that fit into the mid to small level. There is a lot of organizations that do sales on an ad hoc basis and their revenues and results are fluctuating, in some cases not even sustainable because they didn’t place enough effort to formalize and bring structure to their sales efforts. Larger LSPs suffer from sales issues, albeit they are very structured. They have a hard time competing with smaller language service providers that are confusing the clients by offering lowest rates and highest quality which is not an attainable combination. That being said, a properly thought-out sales strategy that fits into an organization’s strategic plans will yield consistent results, consistent experience and a sustainable growth.

 

We have reached the end of this podcast. I hope you learned a few things and were able to sharpen your sales skills to grow your organizations. Remember, I believe in sharing knowledge, whether it’s mine or my guests and this conversation was an example of that. Please share this knowledge with others in our industry and beyond to help us professionalize how we do business.

 

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or on your platform of choice and give this episode a thumbs up or 5-star rating.

 

Until next time!

 

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