I am the recipient of several emails a week from people wanting to sell their translation services to me. It’s clear these salespeople think I am a localization company. They tell me all about their superior quality, fast delivery, great prices, and a description of all kinds of ancillary services that are completely irrelevant to my business.
While it’s true that my former company name Localization Sales & Marketing had the word “localization” in it, these folks ignored the two other important words in my company’s name: sales and marketing. A quick look at my LinkedIn profile or a brief read of my homepage would have told them that I am a sales trainer and consultant FOR the localization and translation industry, not a buyer of translation services. This is old fashioned selling at best and lazy selling at worst or perhaps both. When I receive these generic messages that only talk about themselves, I sometimes respond with an offer of my own services to help them improve their sales outreach. Their efforts end up being an unintended means of lead generation for me!
Even if these emails were reaching their intended audience, I doubt the response rate would be any higher than mine, because they are given no reason to respond. Sales is not throwing enough “proverbial” at the wall and hoping it sticks!
All buyers today are looking for more and this includes LSP owners, vendor managers (for you SLVs out there) and end customers. Buyers want you to understand them and tailor the message to their needs. High quality, on time delivery at a fair price are assumed and do nothing to differentiate you from your competitors. As a wise sales manager recently said to me “people want to see themselves in what you are saying”. If they can’t, you are wasting your precious sales time and you certainly won’t make your numbers.
Sales outreach must be tailored and personalized to the recipient of your outreach with something that gives them a reason to want to talk to you. Find out a bit more about the buyer’s company and about the buyer herself. Find something that speaks to her on a deeper level. Use your knowledge of their industry to show how you can help them more than your competitor or how you can solve problems they would typically face.
Using the scenario I describe above about the emails I receive, I would respond far more positively if these folks would ask if I ever localize my training materials into other languages where English is less commonly spoken among their salespeople and/or project management teams. Or perhaps they could suggest I could localize my website to attract additional customers in xx countries, perhaps even citing a statistic or two. Or they might ask if I record my trainings and need subtitles/voiceover for certain markets. Although I don’t currently need these services, I would be far more likely to respond to emails or calls that have had thought put into them. A far better result than me hitting the delete key or offering my own services in return!
Take a look at your own inbox and review the spam you deleted and ask yourself why you deleted it. My guess is that it wasn’t relevant to you and this is exactly what customers may be thinking about yours.
FluentSales