Video Overview
#9 episode of Helping B2B High Ticket Service Providers Grow – One Lesson at a Time, with Wendy Pease.
As the proud owner and president of Rapport International, Wendy has a lot of expertise, and experience to selflessly share.
She says that many English-speaking countries and states, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, etc., should consider non-English-speaking countries, in order to expand internationally.
With a concise and clever translation, you can expand in non-English countries and have the amazing opportunity to be unique, says Wendy.
She is the author of the book: “The Language of Global Marketing”
FREE chapters of her book: “The Language of Global Marketing“
She is also the host of the podcast: “The Global Marketing Show“
Book a free 30-minute consultation: Meeting with Wendy Pease
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Speakers
Interview Transcript
[00:00:07.490] – Dancho – Hello, everybody. Welcome to another show. By now you should know that my name is Dancho. If not, then try to look at a few other episodes behind. Welcome to another episode on helping B2B high ticket service providers – one lesson at a time. As I promised so far, every time I’m working really hard to find the best B2B experts out there in order to get the golden nugget. And I did it, of course. For today, I have Wendy Pease as a guest. She’s coming from Boston, and you have to listen to this. So she is the founder of Reports International, which is perfect. Then she also is an author, which we have so many things in common to talk. The book is the language of global marketing, and she’s also hosting a podcast, which is the Global Marketing Show. So Wendy, welcome.
[00:00:53.800] – Wendy – Thank you, Dancho. It’s so great to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:58.180] – Dancho – Well, if you are actually hosting a show, you know how things go, how more open and communicative you are, the more things we can go through. Wendy, for everybody that don’t know, I already told the title, but if you could just give us a short description of who you are and what you do?
[00:01:18.650] – Wendy – Sure. Well, I’m actually the owner and President of Rapport International. I wish I could say founder, but there was a wonderful woman who founded the business over 30 years ago and 17 years ago, she was ready to move on and do something else. So I bought the company and we’ve grown it every year since and made another acquisition about six years ago. And I’ve got a fabulous team right now that really focuses on quality. For the last ten years that we’ve been tracking, we have 100% on time delivery and we have 100% satisfaction guarantee on our services, which are written translation services and spoken interpretation services. Anything from websites to brochures, legal contracts, HR communications, anything really high quality written and then interpreting can be Zoom meetings or in person, telephone, any format.
[00:02:21.330] – Dancho – And, Wendy, I’m really curious, as you’re saying, 100% customer satisfaction. I know that when in the translation world, you’re depending on too many people in too many different languages. So I’m really curious, how do you actually control or ensure that the quality is perfect?
[00:02:40.890] – Wendy – Excellent question. So many people feel like, well, I don’t speak the language. I can’t proof it. So I don’t know if it’s going to be good quality or not. So therefore, they go off to Google Translate or they just find somebody who’s bilingual. But if you speak another language, you know that there are different levels of literacy that you can have in a language. So we spend a long time assigning the right person to each project. So we call it linguistic matchmaking, and that’s what I got when I bought the company is this history of who was good. And so we’ve worked with some of the linguists for over 30 years because they’ve been around and we know how good they are. They specialize, they’re not only fully bilingual in their language because we provide over 200 languages. So we have to have a lot of experts. They are fully bilingual in their language pair. Plus, they have industry knowledge on what they’re translating. So it could be a former lawyer, who’s doing a translation, it can be a marketing specialist. We’ve got…
[00:03:49.090] – Dancho – Industry expertise.
[00:03:50.850] – Wendy – Industry expertise. A lot of them have PhDs and Masters. So we’re really looking for high quality, we’re not just putting anybody in there.
[00:04:00.510] – Dancho – Well, that’s really deep, because in this 21st century, everything is online, everything is digital. And even if you ask me, we all want stable suppliers, same as our clients expect the same from us, because they also want stable suppliers. And I think that switching from one supplier to another is just because you want to find the right fit. And once you have a good fit, why would you actually move? And maybe this is what we preach to our clients that, you know, what, if we figure out a way how you can get a positive return on investment, that’s it. You stay forever, because as long as we keep delivering the same value to you, why would you actually move? And perhaps that’s the 100% that you’re saying satisfaction here.
[00:04:43.530] – Wendy – Yes. And so that’s one part of it is putting the right person on. But then we also look at translation, like writing. And so if one person does it, if it’s really important, you’re going to have an editor on it. So we’ll talk through as to, so we guarantee our version of it. But if it’s really important, the client may choose to have an editor on it because it may not be grammar mistakes or word choices, it could be interpretation of it. For example, we had a translator do the tagline for a hospital. And that was it’s all about getting better. And the translator wrote it – it’s all about getting healthier and getting better. And the editor read it and said, I don’t think it’s about getting healthier. I think it’s about the hospital providing better services. And in English, you can have the double meaning. But in Haitian Creole, when we were translating it, you couldn’t have the double meaning because you had to have a subject. And so on that neither was right nor wrong. But we had to go back to the client and say, which way do you want this translated? And then a third step is some clients have internal folks or relationships or distributors with people who speak that language, maybe sales reps in the market that they want to review it. And so we say, yeah, have them review it, track changes, bring it back to us. And we can tell you everything from, oh, yes, word choice, that’s fine. To now they’ve made grammar mistakes, and this is why or they’ve changed the meaning. Do you want it to say this, or do you want it to say what you originally said? So we carry a liability insurance policy that we’ve never had to access in over 30 years. And when creative agencies get involved, they don’t carry a liability insurance policy because it’s hard to ensure creativity. So sometimes we’ll have some pushback on messaging there until we actually come together on what it can mean. So those are all the steps that you can do if you only speak one language or you don’t speak that particular language to make sure that you get quality.
[00:07:03.570] – Dancho – Yeah. So you actually have steps to ensure that the highest possible quality. I was also curious, how do you actually connect the book? Because I saw the book was published, like, few months ago, the language of global marketing. And I was really curious to know from the translation and interpretation, you also moved into marketing as well?
[00:07:28.410] – Wendy – Yes. So one of our specialties is marketing translation, because that really takes a cultural adaptation. What might work in one country may not work in another. For example, in the United States, we have something called refrigerator art, and that’s when you’re very proud of your child’s drawing and you hang it on the refrigerator to show it like your art gallery. Well, when we were doing a translation for Staples, a big company here in the US, they were putting it into French. And the French translator looked at it and said, In France, there’s not a thing as refrigerator art. Your refrigerator is for keeping food cold, not for doing anything else. But speaking of books, Dancho, you have one out. “Sweet Leads”. I’m so excited about that.
[00:08:21.680] – Dancho – Yeah, I will mention it also, it’s coming up in one or two weeks officially on Amazon. We’re going to do the author part, the Amazon best selling stuff. I don’t know if it’s hard to achieve, but we’re going to go for it. So in two days it’s going to be on some discount. And maybe you can also share some tips Wendy, when you launched the book, what did you actually do?
[00:08:48.450] – Wendy – Well, I think you and I both know that when you’re in an industry, you have very deep knowledge and suggestions to give people that they’re not living every day. And so when you start hearing the same questions all the time, you write it in a book because it can give access to people when they’re asking these questions, and they oftentimes don’t know where to go. So probably since yours is called “Sweet Leads” and you do lead generation, and mine is about global marketing, translating your domestic strategies into international sales and profits. I wrote all those questions that I get, plus mistakes, people that have made and issues you can run into, English isn’t the global language. So it’s been fun. Somebody called it the primer for exporting. And I found out last Friday that a professor is going to use it in one of his marketing classes at a University in Canada.
[00:09:50.130] – Dancho – Wow. So it’s a business book, it’s not just for companies, but it’s also for the academics. I wish I’ll get there, but slowly, eventually.
[00:10:00.750] – Wendy – I’ll read the book and let you know. But I’m sure they’re starting to teach sales at University, and you’re a hot topic.
[00:10:09.790] – Dancho – Yeah. Especially B2B, it’s really a niche in a niche in a B2B environment. It’s always less covered because I don’t know, B2C is a bit more… And honestly, when you said now, international from domestic strategies into international, is it more for products or is it more for services?
[00:10:30.130] – Wendy – It’s both. Services are the biggest export from the United States. And so I think that’s often overlooked. And so many companies think you have to have a product that will go. But if you have businesses or services, think about if they could be sold internationally, and most of them can unless you’re like a dry cleaner. Or I can’t even say restaurant, because I know a lot of restaurants that come up with a unique product, and then they sell their products online internationally, because if you come to Boston and you try something and you want to order it again, you can put that online and sell it. Yeah. And then you have chains. There’s so many chains that are international. So really think through what you could put online because it all feeds off each other.
[00:11:19.930] – Dancho – Yeah.
[00:11:20.810] – Wendy – You have a product that ends up selling online that becomes popular, and it started in your restaurant, then you can have people come back. But there’s all sorts of, like marketing companies. They can be selling internationally, they should be because they could be talking to all their clients about their products and services and how they could be going internationally. But I think so many people are afraid of other languages and cultures that they don’t think about starting at.
[00:11:49.510] – Dancho – Nice.
[00:11:50.710] – Wendy – Consultant speaker. I know you do B2B lead generation. We were talking about trainers, consultants, speakers. I’ve seen more of an interest in that because people travel internationally to provide all their services. So all you have to do is take your website, put the little globe icon up on top, the drop down to the languages, and then you can do a landing page. You don’t have to do your whole website, but do a landing page and optimize it for the countries that you want to go to and train in or that have a need for your services. It’s huge.
[00:12:26.230] – Dancho – Yeah, no, you had a great point. And perhaps Wendy, that was actually my main motivation, why I wanted you on the show because we work with a lot of high ticket service providers, and whether it’s a software company or consultancy or training coach or even marketing and sales agencies, and when we touch the topic of growth, it’s always like, well, I don’t know. It’s risky, what if they don’t like me? Okay, that’s more for the consultants. But the language barrier came up several times as a topic. And when I saw that you’re really not just the translation, but also from the marketing aspect and how your whole business is positioned, that you know what companies should start thinking international. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to become corporations overnight, but actually starting to work on different markets gives them even different insights and different perspectives.
[00:13:18.970] – Wendy – Oh, yes, it’s fantastic. And on my Global Marketing Show podcast, I interview people from around the world and their experiences of going into different countries and what they find the same and what they find different. And so there’s such an opportunity for consultants, trainers, service providers, technology companies. Think from the start, from the very start think globally because I know too many… Pardon?
[00:13:48.410] – Dancho – Sorry I interrupted. Their nature is digital, their root is digital.
[00:13:53.360] – Wendy – Their root is digital, but if they don’t build the software platform for going international, they’re going to have problems later on. Because like you said, they’re naturally digital. And if somebody finds them online, they’re going to want to use them and they’re wanting to naturally go into translation. So think global from the start. I’d say that to any business owner, it doesn’t mean you have to do it. The other thing that I’d really recommend is so many companies from here in the US or Australia or the UK, when they think about going international, they think about going to other English speaking countries. And so you’ve got a lot of competition because all the other English speaking companies are going into those countries. But with a small investment of translation, you can go into another country where you’re going to be unique and have a different viewpoint and have much better returns for your efforts.
[00:14:55.370] – Dancho – Nice. I think that this is really valuable for the community because there are talks about going international and going even to, like French or Germany because they’re huge countries. It’s not like Macedonia – 2 million, by the way.
[00:15:12.650] – Wendy – I would go to Macedonia now that I know it’s so close to Greece. It’s gotta be beautiful.
[00:15:23.510] – Dancho – The tourism – we’re pretty good, pretty well situated. I was really curious, in regards to your advice when it comes to companies, even take from Macedonia or from other small countries that want to go, as you said, okay, I can take USA, Germany and France because there are like three different languages on a different continent even. Where they should even start from? What would be the process there?
[00:15:48.870] – Wendy – Okay. So we’ve come up with a stage process that we recommend, and I talk about it in the book because it gives you a way to think about it. First, you have to think about your strategy. So what is your corporate strategy? I mean, if you’re a person heading up marketing and sales and you’re listening to this and you yeah, I’m going to go international, but you don’t have the buy in from the senior executive team, you’re going to run into problems. The first thing is you have to make sure you’re in alignment with your corporate strategy, and then you have a marketing strategy. And under that, you’ve got your multilingual marketing strategy. So all of those have to line up. So if your global strategy, like, I know a marketing agency right now that’s grown phenomenally in the US. And this year they said we’re going to focus more on global marketing. And so that’s their corporate strategy, so that can all fall into an alignment with what you’re doing with your global marketing. Okay. And then you have to pick where you’re going to want to go? How many languages you’re going to want to go into? Are there countries you’re already getting interest from? With all the Google metrics that are out there, you can see who’s visiting your website. So start with your strategy and build from there. The second thing you’re going to want to look at is your process. What is your marketing process now? Do you have content creators? What are you putting out there? How are you getting new business in? And so you want to take that process and mimic it. But build in how you’re going to make it multilingual or where your global focus is going to come in. My recommendation is to start maybe with one language, tighten up how that process looks like. And then it’s easy to replicate. What research do I need to do? How do I need to modify my persona? What content do I need translated to go into the other languages? The third prong is look at technology. Don’t use Google Translate for any of your marketing translation. That really is a huge mistake. And I’ve got all sorts of examples that we could get into. But there are technologies that can help, like, we use translation memory. So if we do translation for somebody, we can keep that memory. And then if they have the same material that they need to reuse, we can pull that up. So you have consistency of voice and you have simplifying the translation process and you can reuse material and good marketers, you know, are reusing it. What you put on your brochures, what you’re going to be on your website, which might be in your PowerPoint capabilities presentation. So you’re leveraging your content that way. Look for ways that technology can help. Now, if you look at Airbnb or Travelocity, they have built in some machine translation like Google Translate, and it makes sense for them because customers leave reviews. So all their corporate stuff is done high quality. But for customer reviews, if you leave one in Macedonia and it’s not in English and I want to read it, I can click “Translate now” and it’ll give it to me in my language. It’s not going to be accurate, but it’s going to give me the gist enough of the field, so that’s an appropriate use for technology. And then the fourth one that I suggest looking at is quality. What materials have to be high quality, what materials don’t. Again, a good use for Google Translate is you get an unsolicited email. You don’t know what it says. You wonder if it’s a business request, pop it into Google Translate and see what it says.
[00:19:38.870] – Dancho – Get the idea.
[00:19:40.220] – Wendy – Yes. Now, if you’re a speaker and it’s an email about a million dollar presentation that somebody is offering, you’re not going to want it to go into Google Translate to respond to that. You’re going to want to either pull copy that you’ve already translated from your website, or you’re going to want to find somebody that can help you with that communication. And maybe telephone interpreting. At $1.40 per minute, you can get somebody on the line to actually hold a conversation and win that million dollar deal.
[00:20:16.330] – Dancho – Wow! I will need time to digest all that you said compressed in, like, okay, I should actually just buy the whole book, because then I can go over into more stages.
[00:20:26.950] – Wendy – Yes. Or if you’re listening to this and you’re getting really excited about global marketing and want me to help you pull together a plan, just reach out to me. I love helping people figure out how to do it.
[00:20:37.320] – Dancho – Yeah, Wendy, I was also curious. You’ve touched the services and products from experience, where are the bigger mistakes? Whether service oriented companies think that they don’t have anything to expert, it’s easy to go internationally, and they jump like we are international company or with the products where they just say, well, I’ll just translate the product description. And, boom, I actually have an international product. Where the more mistakes occurs?
[00:21:07.750] – Wendy – I think one mistake, there’s an excellent podcast episode about this with Brittany Cooper on The Global Marketing Show. And she talked about this travel company that she went that founded and they wanted to launch internationally. And so they were going to be like the go to hub for people to book local tours. And they were flying all over the world getting the tour operators. And so they had all these tour operators they could put on their website. But they didn’t focus on advertising for visitors to book the tours. And so what she talks about is they didn’t take one market, develop a process and then replicate it. They tried to go too wide and they didn’t have the resources to support all that. So I think that’s one thing is just make sure you have enough resources to actually commit to a market. I think the second thing is when you commit to going global, it takes a little bit of time. So it’s not something that you say, well, we’ll try it this quarter or these six months. You’ve got to go out and you’ve got to build relationships, so allow time. I think a third mistake is people thinking that English is the global language or the Google plug-in is going to do fine for your website. It’s not. There’s research that said that over 72% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites that are in their own language. So even if you’re bilingual, you’re still going to choose your native language. Over 72% said they’d be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language. So again, if you’re providing accurate in language and if they come and it’s not a good translation and it’s hard to read, they’re going to click off that and go someplace else. And then over half of the consumers said they pay more money for something if they could get the information in their native language. So you invest a little bit in translation, you’re going to get more visitors who stay longer and will pay more.
[00:23:30.370] – Dancho – Much better return of investment. Especially if you’re not making frequent changes on the website. So you just translate to several languages, you keep it as it is, and then you can utilize that translation for the years to come.
[00:23:44.130] – Wendy – Yes, exactly. And so often I’ll get a call and somebody will say, well, we want to translate our website. And I say, okay. They’ve got a huge website with lots of press releases, lots of blogs that have gone back for years and years. And to do the translation is quite expensive. What they can do is a microsite, so they think through what products do I want to sell in this market that speak this language and what additional information do they need? They need something about the company. They need how to order or how to get in touch with the sales reputor or distributor. They want to know more about how they can get user information. So you can develop a microsite, and then beyond that, if you’re a consultant, a trainer or in that industry, maybe you just do a landing page. I had a client that sells measuring devices. He measures wind, and he was paying attention to the metrics on his website. And he saw he was getting a lot of visits from Germany. He was like, well, I wonder what’s going on there. So he just put up a landing page in German, and that helped increase his sales in that market. So whole website, microsite or landing page, affordable for everyone.
[00:25:06.370] – Dancho – Yeah, nice. No, that was really spot on. So even if you have 150 blogs, there’s no point in translating rather than focus on the core for that particular country or that particular language, just work around it.
[00:25:22.210] – Wendy – Right. And then you know that websites, as long as you continue adding information, it stays alive for the Google algorithm to pick up on it. So look over your historical blogs, see which one has got the most hits, and then put an editorial calendar out to take one of those blogs, translate it and add it each month if you want to keep growing activity on that site.
[00:25:50.770] – Dancho – Nice. Well, Wendy, you put some thoughts in my head. Now I need to consider how to figure out the translation for us as well, because when people say translation, you’re like, yeah, it’s important. People need it and then you’re like, well, why don’t you have it? Well, I don’t need it. Then you’re like, well, you know what how much the percentage 70-something % of the people prefer to buy on their languages and stuff and you’re like, wow, actually, this is quite important if you really want to show yourself as an international business because it’s not just do the sales people know Spanish or German. It’s also whether your website, your marketing activities also reflect. So I think that maybe from creative part just figuring out the blog is the hardest part. But instead of immediately translating it to too many languages, you had a good point. Well, every month you can just add one more language. Or every month you can just add one more blog to that particular language. So it is growing organically through time. It’s not like a huge effort. Let’s translate everything from start. And Wendy, we are getting short on time. I wanted to ask you, I mean, I’m sure that people would figure out that they’re going to need translation, this way or another. How people can actually reach out to you?
[00:27:13.930] – Wendy – I am all over social media, so you can just look for Wendy Pease, translation expert on LinkedIn, Facebook. We have a “Global Marketing Group”. What’s it called “Global Marketing and Growth group” on Facebook that’s building up and getting more active. You can reach us at Rapport, R-A-P-P-O-R-T, rapporttranslations.com. Or you can go to my Linktree and get some free chapters of the book, the link to Amazon. So it’s linktr.ee/wendypease, L-I-N-K-T-R.E-E/wendypease. And it has links to all my social media, to the books, to the websites. More information than you need to know.
[00:28:01.840] – Dancho – I actually checked the linktree. You even have YouTube, the Twitter and all your social media, which was actually smart with one URL you’re covering… What I will do, Wendy, I’ll just put the links below the video. So if people that want it, they can just click directly on the link that they need. Usually before I finish, I wanted to summarize because I’m the student here, Wendy. And instead of one golden nugget, I actually figure out five different. I was actually taking notes. That’s what I do during these meetings. It’s a learning session. And if I don’t learn, then why should others learn?
[00:28:37.990] – Wendy – Excellent.
[00:28:38.810] – Dancho – If I can just go over the five things that I really want to pinpoint or showcase. Well, first was I really loved the part about the quality. So the golden nugget here was that, well, if you put the right people in the right spot, you can actually guarantee the success. And this is what you said that you don’t choose anyone, but they’re handpicked people with years of experience, with even industry expertise, with even academic background, so that really stick with me. The second thing that resonates still with me was that, think global from the start, and that companies should look international from day one. Maybe they don’t need to do it, but should start thinking about the international aspect, that was the second part. The third part, I’m not sure whether I captured all the thoughts from your framework, but one was the strategy, with the three, four sub strategies, then was the process, then the technology and the quality. And what I really liked was that you don’t need to have equal quality everywhere. For example, if it’s a corporate marketing materials, it has to be perfect, no excuses. If it’s user generated content, yeah, then you can afford a Google translator or some other mechanism because you cannot afford to translate all the user generated content. So that was really interesting. And instead of rushing, point 4, was to actually just start with one market. You’re going to make a lot of mistakes, try to learn on that one market on that one particular language, learn a lot from that. And then when you move on the next one, you already know exactly what to skip and what mistakes to avoid. And the last part that I had, point 5, was that actually the website is critical to be on the consumer native language. Because all the percentages, okay, I’m not a number guy, but all the percentages that you show actually meant that it is worthwhile in investing in setting your website in multiple languages, because like it or not, as you said, people, users, consumers would like to read it in their native language, and it’s far more obvious that they are going to make the right decisions when it’s on their language. So five golden nuggets Wendy, I was hoping for one.
[00:30:54.310] – Wendy – Oh my gosh! You really listen well, thank you.
[00:30:57.790] – Dancho – That was the whole point. And I really appreciated Wendy coming on the podcast, I really hope that our tribe, our community, will capture this golden nuggets. And of course, some of them, they will use it. They can check out your book or they can reach out to you and actually listen a bit more how they can focus on the international market. Because as you said, international market is not the US. For Macedonians, it’s usually like US is a big market, but Europe is a big continent and actually the whole world is quite big. And if you do it strategically, there is much more of the market that can be taken.
[00:31:38.660] – Wendy – Yes, yes. You’re so right!
[00:31:40.570] – Dancho – Wendy, I wanted to thank you again for coming on the show and for everybody else. I hope that you really enjoyed this show as same as I did, actually.
[00:31:51.610] – Wendy – Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
[00:31:55.210] – Dancho – Same here, Wendy. Bye, bye.