26 June 2008

Is Your Localization Expertise Really Vertical?

Your prospect says, "How do I know that you can really do a good job localizing my product?"

Well, how are you going to convince him?

I'm writing a paper for a small localization vendor right now, and we're coming up against that issue. The vendor has identified a prospect in a specific vertical industry - real estate development - that needs to get its translation act together, but the prospect is new to translation. And when humans don't know very much about a new product or service they need to buy, they tend to look for high-level things in common with vendors: common friends, common industries, common schools, common playgroups.

So the prospect will be comfortable if it can see the names of some big, flashy players in the real estate vertical for whom the vendor has done work. Unfortunately, the vendor does not have those names on its client list.

The vendor does, however, have a long track record of solving exactly the kinds of workflow and translation quality problems that afflict this particular prospect. Still, the prospect wants the warm fuzzies that come from knowing somebody else in its industry has been through this with this vendor before.

We're hoping that the paper will - in plain language - distract the prospect from the name-game and get it to focus on the fact that its hair is on fire, and demonstrate that the vendor has the workflow, the technology and the global reach it will take to fix the prospect's translation problems. (It also has the translation expertise, and we're going to mention that as well, even though we in the industry know that just about every vendor can reach just about every translator.)

Think about your sales presentations, your marketing collateral and the content on your Web site. Do you bother to tell a different story from one industry to the next? How do they differ? Do prospects accept it, or are you still losing projects because you don't have the names?

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