I’m prompted to write this post, because one of my industry colleague and friends, @Corinne Smith shared in her LinkedIn post today that a client told her they achieved an extra $750,000 in sales over 3 months on the £10,000 they spent on translation. That’s a pretty darn nice return on investment!
Not all customers measure the ROI of translations and if they do, they don’t (or won’t) always tell us about it. This is yet another selling skill that salespeople, account managers, senior management and yes, even project managers need to employ by simply asking the question “how did our services help you” or “what was the result of our work over the past quarter”? OR in an outbound sales conversation “how do you measure the success of your translated content?”
While a monetary figure would be fantastic, some of our clients measure success in other ways. Perhaps it saved x lives or enable x people to vote or helped x number of employees understand legal changes in their industry. Whichever way they measure it, it’s important to ask! Why? Because it benefits them and us!
Clients who can articulate the value of our services are less likely to argue about pennies on the word with us and are better armed to justify the expenditure to their budget holder. When they can articulate the ROI they are less likely to be enticed by the cheaper supplier who has no ROI information, especially those using the quality, delivery, price pitch I mentioned in my post yesterday. Customer retention is more important than ever in today’s world and this is one way to ensure it and prevents vendor churn on the client side. Win-win!
ROI information enables business developers to provide specific examples (with permission of course) to help win new customers rather than relying on the quality, delivery, price pitch. Why? Because buying translation is a bit of a leap of faith and any proof of our ability to deliver helps mitigate the risk in the customer’s mind. With ROI proof, it also becomes easier for the customer to build a business case to change translation suppliers, which is something my clients tell me is one of their biggest challenges.
Find out what your clients value about your services. You’ll be glad you asked.
FluentSales