Newsletter - Features
Why Doesn’t the Buyer Respond to Your Email or Phone Call?
Daniel Carter
What is wrong when a client (translation/localization buyer) tells me that she doesn’t answer her phone, respond to email, or even listen to her voicemail anymore? For a number of the clients I have spoken to recently, the reason is often similar. In many cases, it starts when a client’s name is somehow publicized in some way or other.
In one specific case, a client made a presentation at a major industry
conference, where her name and company were included in the conference
program and promotional literature. During the time since her
presentation, she has received as many as twenty calls a day from
vendors and her mailbox is full of unsolicited vendor email. A few
persistent salespeople call and email her almost every day, even though
she has said “NO” to them numerous times. In one particularly
unfortunate case, two different salespeople from the same company
contacted her repeatedly without knowing that the other person was also
calling her. So, she doesn’t answer her phone, she has an impenetrable
SPAM filter, and she doesn’t respond to your email. Despite the annoying
calls, messages and relentless salespeople, today she has a more
serious, but related, problem.
So, what is wrong? She goes on to
explain that she is looking for a good supplier for a new language. She
asks me if I know anything about a particular localization company. Yes,
I have heard of them but I don’t have any personal experience with them,
so I can’t really tell her much. This is unfortunate, because despite
all of the phone calls, email messages, looking at websites and
conducting other research, she really doesn’t know which vendors to
approach for her new project.
All the vendors talk about their
quality, service, price, on-time delivery and how they can deliver the
translation in any of forty languages. But after listening to sales
pitches, reading emails, reviewing websites, and looking through
brochures, she doesn’t know who is who anymore. All of the
vendors sound the same. She really doesn’t know what, if anything,
is unique about any of them. She is sophisticated and experienced enough
to understand that every multi-language vendor will outsource the
translation to single-language vendors or directly to freelancers. And
since she has been burned in the past by vendors that sounded good but
let her down, she is skeptical about their claims regarding quality,
service and on-time delivery.
Shaun Daggett, CEO of ClientSide
News calls this the “me, too vendor syndrome”. “There are thousands of
service providers that offer the same services. Ask the first one in
line what they do for clients—and every other vendor in that line will
simply reply "me, too!”
After the burst of the tech
bubble, vendors were doing anything they could think of to keep their
sales from falling off, and most hired more salespeople. After that
failed, the vendor community began development of “differentiation”
products -- services or partnerships which would set them apart. The
problem was that clients saw through these thinly veiled attempts and
ignored most of the marketing attempts.
Now we seem to have come
full circle, and we're seeing a new level of buyer confusion. The truth
is that, to the average localization services buyer, all vendors look
basically the same. Even the savviest buyers still can’t clearly
articulate what makes Lionbridge different from Bowne.”
Having spent more time on the vendor side of our industry, I feel that I
am as guilty of this as any particular vendor is. We are (generally
speaking) the cause of our own pain. And as far as I can tell, we really
don’t seem to be changing. Or at least not enough of us are changing
fast enough. And there are so many new vendors entering the industry
from Asia, specifically China, that our previous errors are being
carried forward by a new generation of suppliers.
So instead of
asking why she doesn’t answer her phone or respond to your email, I
think we should ask, “What is wrong with us?” Why do
we keep trying to sell the same thing, repeatedly, in the same way, just
like hundreds or thousands of other translation or localization
suppliers? And while I’m at it, why do vendors that do 95% of their work
in a single language try to market themselves as multi-lingual vendors?
Is it a wonder that translation and localization is often considered a
commodity when the localization vendors and translation suppliers make
it sound like a commodity? Wouldn’t we be more successful if
created and promoted an image of our company that is unique and sets us
apart from the hundreds or thousands of other translation or
localization suppliers? So the next time we get a chance to talk, I hope
you can tell me what you do, what problem you can help my client solve,
and just what is unique about your company and the services you offer .
. .
Daniel is an industry veteran with over twenty years in the industry on both the client and supplier sides. He has worked for Microsoft as the Group Localization Manager for Operating Systems and Hardware products and ran his own localization company for over a decade. He has served on the GALA Board for the past three years and is the Deputy President of TILP. Daniel is currently a consultant for both industry buyers and suppliers helping companies with their international business strategy, production process, vendor selection, marketing, and sales tactics and execution. He can be contacted at daniel@allcarters.com.