You guessed it! I’m writing about storytelling again. I’m doing so because I’ve found that many of my consulting and training clients, when I suggest the idea of telling compelling stories to win new customers, they tell me they don’t have any good stories to tell their prospective customers. In all cases I’ve found this to be untrue.
ALL LSPs have great stories to tell: they either don’t know where to find them or don’t realise the value of the services they deliver to customers every day of the week (or both). Sometimes they have stories, but undersell themselves by not telling them effectively. This is particularly true of LSPs that don’t have a marketer or outbound sales people who constantly want new or more compelling information to send to their prospects and who might push customers or their own management for case studies or testimonials (aka stories).
As I alluded to in my previous post, Storytelling in Translation Sales, we must give customers some kind of information that differentiates us from our competitors that is memorable and meaningful to their roles, business objectives and problems. Otherwise we remain one in a sea of similar services where the customer can’t distinguish one LSP from another.
So Where Are These Stories?
Your project management team is a great place to start! They are the ones in the trenches making things happen: solving problems, juggling priorities, adjusting workflows, dealing with last-minute changes, managing customer expectations, pulling all-nighters to deliver on time, managing quality. They have a lot of war stories and pretty cool projects they’ve made happen. The trouble is that we tend to view the end as simply delivering a bunch of translated text, on time and to expected quality levels. From a PM point of view, this understandable, because from their point of view this is success and where their part of the story ends. What is missing from this picture is how all of this actually helps the client…the real happy ending…that we often fail to find out.
So What Next?
It’s time for business owners, sales people, senior managers or even project managers to pick up the phone and ask clients what the “happy ending” was. This is not asking, “were you happy with our translation”. It’s asking what the results of the translation were. If it was a brochure, you should ask whether it attracted new customers. If it was a contract, did they conclude the deal? If was a new product launch, did it generate revenue in international markets? These are RESULTS on your clients terms and this is what prospective customers want to hear about. I’m betting your customers will be pleased you took an interest and might even be willing to formally put their name on the story. Whether they do or not should not prevent you from asking. A true story without a name is more compelling than no story at all.
It’s also time for a large number of PMs to peer beyond files and words and think about the very real impact they have on their customers businesses. I see this time and time again in my Selling Skills for Translation Project Managers course. They’ve never really thought about what the customer actually does with the translation and what it helps them achieve. This alone has generated some pretty cool stories once they really thought about it.
I’ve made a lot of business owners and sales people dig into their PM teams to learn their war stories, to find out about their most challenging or interesting projects. With some clients I’ve even asked them to talk to their key translators about their most interesting or challenging projects. What they uncovered was one heck of a lot of fodder for amazing stories. In one case we uncovered litigation that ultimately put an international criminal in jail. Another helped customers get their product to market a week faster than before. A subsequent call uncovered that this had helped the company substantially increase its revenue. Others got information translated to educate a disadvantaged community about disease prevention. This no doubt saved lives.
Isn’t this more interesting laundry-listing our services?
I challenge you today to dig into your production team and find the root of 3 great stories. Call these customers and find out what happened! It’s highly likely you’ll have 3 great stories to use for developing new business. For those of you who take this challenge, I’d love to know what happens!
