LSPs As Global Growth Partners

More than Translation

Sometimes change happens overnight, other times in gradual steps. For language service providers (LSPs) who have been around the block a few times, it's the latter. They have in twists and turns over the years evolved into consultancy hubs. They are busy finding ways to implement AI to enhance their service offerings. The successful LSPs of tomorrow should already have made significant adjustments to their business models to meet buyers' needs.

Sales Readiness

In any sales scenario, it is imperative for a service provider to understand a buyer's business model and goals before it can demonstrate how it is in a position to provide a solution. When an LSP starts a sales discussion, though, it can be tempting for it to frame the discussion around word counts, target languages, and deadlines. This is a natural outgrowth of the LSP's deliverables-focused ethos and can be forgiven to a certain degree. It is a kind of mental-muscle conditioning that has a gravitational pull. Sales leadership needs to pull reps out of this way of thinking.

My view is that successful, up and coming LSPs have been evolving out of that tactical mindset to stay relevant from the buyer's perspective. LSPs know that they need to align with decision makers, who often don't know—don't even want to know—about the number of words. Conversations need to quickly cut to partner-like Q&A. Any early successes or failures in an international market? What's your product mix? LSPs from the Nimdzi 100 through the long tail have considerable knowledge about global growth use cases. They are becoming more vocal about it at the relationship-building stage. Which leaves little room for discussing traditional translation stuff on those first calls.

What this means in practice is that LSPs' sales reps need to be able to discern striations of business need where localization is a strategic fit. This is leading to new realities for LSP sales reps and managers.

1. The bar is higher. Reps are are under pressure to stay deeply informed of change in the industry by reading relevant publications, joining webinars, pushing themselves to experiment with technology, and keeping pace with the l10n vernacular.
2. The cost of sales is higher, but so too are the potential rewards. LSPs need to equip the reps with plentiful learning resources—as much tech and educational support as the budget can withstand. The company is out of pocket in the short term, but over the long haul, the additional knowledge will serve as a fount for new sales ideas, solutions, and revenue opportunities.

Complexity Catalyzing Change

This matters because the dynamics that buyers face these days has become incredibly complex. The rapidity of technological change is breathtaking, of course. But concomitant with that reality is an ebb and flow of budget lifecycles that hasn't existed in recent memory. I like to call it the "now you see it, now you don't" phenomenon.

Companies are like children at the beach during a New England summer. They gallop towards the water to dive in, but stop abruptly when the jarring cold water shocks their senses. The eagerness is there, but so are tendencies to be sensitive to early feedback and reflexively pull back.

So, stepping into a new sales conversation asking questions about volume is a touch naive and has been for quite some time. Yes, it is necessary ultimately. But the LSP's goal is to help uncover localizable data that makes sense for the buyer. And it might be quite a small number to begin with. The volume will follow.

Where to Begin

The LSP is several degrees removed from the buyer's center of power. They have to rely on developing relationships and earning trust with stakeholders, who themselves are often on the fringes of managerial power. But that's the game. They need to diligently learn the buyer's overall goals and then help align localization spend with those goals.

To that end, LSPs are—or certainly should be—asking good questions before even mentioning translation.

• How is the buyer planning to operate in its target markets?
• Do they already a presence there?
• What are they planning first, marketing collateral or product?
• Is there a user base?
• If so, is there a breakdown of users in the countries where they operate?
• Has any in-market customer feedback been collected?
• Are there subject matter experts fluent in the target language under contract?

The contours of these conversations is very different than even just 10 years ago because localization services have become so multi-modal. We scrutinize and study information shared to pinpoint how to enable quality and yet economical services that will grow and evolve.

You may be thinking, there's another side to the coin. Aren't localization service providers just a commodity? They preach from the same hymnal: best quality at competitive prices and compelling turnaround times. At the end of the day, the bulk of their service is still translation and that won't change soon. So, what's the big deal?

Buyers Want Expertise

Well, it's not that simple. Good LSPs aren't fighting for just a few more words to translate each year. They are working to evolve the thinking of global strategists through language services. This change of positioning is in reaction to the changing dynamics on the buyer's side as alluded to above. It's an acknowledgement of buyer side realities anyway because translation doesn't exactly figure prominently in the minds of managers to begin with. As succinctly put in a recent blog post by Locale Solutions, Evangelization Is Dead, Long Live Alignment:

Because the company perceives localization as an operational function, the company simply expects localized content to be right. Localization teams are only in the spotlight when it’s wrong; when someone up the chain is yelling because a quality issue surfaced in a language they care about. Localization is either correct (with no managerial comment or thought) or it’s incorrect (with loud managerial protest).

So, there it is. Localization is a process somewhere at the far end of the supply chain and is expected to work.

A major part of the answer to this is expertise. Blair Enns sums it up nicely in his book "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto":

What the world needs, what the better clients are willing to pay for, and what our people want to develop and deliver, is deep expertise. Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. Not price. It is expertise and expertise alone that will set us apart in a meaningful way and allow us to deal with our clients and prospects from a position of power. --Enns, Blair. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto (p. 9). Gegen Press. Kindle Edition.

And what that really means is that selling localization services doesn't start with selling localization services. LSPs need to be experts first and foremost and deliver information that supports a buyer's ROI expectations.

Let's look at an example. Say that a given company is based in the US and wants to do business in Latin America. They have three full-time sales reps in LATAM hustling to get the company's name out there and bring in new streams of revenue.

Where could the LSP start? Well, consider any sound advice about starting in a new market. Or even starting a brand new business. It usually starts with sales in concert with varying degrees of maturity from other corners of the company.

• The reps trumpet the company's core values.
• Marketing provides compelling collateral.
• Product iterates on delightful offerings.

But, it can be a challenge to get all the gears moving together.

Well, without getting bogged down on roadmap timelines, publishing schedules, and so forth, how about arming the reps with poignant in-market collateral first? Copy adaptation comes to mind. Small, high-impact volume.

Could the LSP provide targeted marketing translations to help the reps draw customer interest while carefully monitoring product and marketing developments during the sales cycle? The LSP's sales rep should find opportunities to empower her counterparts on the buyer's side with localized assets. Meantime, the nature of such a conversation imparts an acumen and skillset that builds trust with the buyer and shows that the LSP wants to be a partner for years to come.

LSPs Are Your Growth Partners

The changing dynamics of technology, the economy, and the influx of innovations such as AI and machine translation are creating ever-present shifts to how business is done. The LSP's position as an interlocutor for not just language-related services but global growth strategies that fit the budget has positioned it to become the consulting agency of the future.