Speaking In Sales - Wendy Pease - The Revenue Maze - Episode # 004

Wendy Pease is the Language Translation Expert at Rapport International. She is also the author of “The Global Language of Marketing: Translate Your Domestic Strategies Into International Sales and Profits”. Wendy sits down with host Valerie Cobb to talk about ways to increase your profits and put your business on an upward trajectory.

Takeaways:

  • Have a weekly cash flow call. This will take the stress off of your shoulders and it keeps you in the loop of what is going on.
  • 99% of small businesses fail within the first 1 to 5 years because they don’t understand cash flow and don’t manage it.
  • Human cold calling moves the needle more than an automated system that reaches out to prospects.
  • A big revenue mistake can be that companies aren’t globally from the start. They think the United States is a big enough market but it doesn’t hurt to increase your visibility and ease of use of your brand in other countries. People like to look at websites in their native language.
  • Use high quality translations where it counts. Google translate on a web page isn’t reliable and can make your website look unprofessional.
  • You want to make people feel comfortable. If you have people at your company who can translate, it can make customers who don’t speak the same language feel welcomed and that can lead to an increase in revenue.
  • Connect with other business owners around the world. You can open their eyes to expanding their revenue by placing their business in other countries.

Quote of the Show:

15:53 I think that one of the biggest revenue mistakes that we see our clients making is not thinking global from the start. Just thinking, well, I’ve got a big enough market in the United States, but you look at the e-commerce companies, they’re putting information up there, they’re getting hits from all over the world… Let’s look at your website and see how we can take them through the buyer’s journey and make sure that your product or service is ready for them to use.”

 

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Speaking In Sales – Wendy Pease – The Revenue Maze

I am here with a cultural word smith global communication wizard, author of The Language of Global Marketing, and language and translation expert of Rapport International, Wendy Pease. I’m glad to have you on this show.

Valerie, thank you so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

I loved reading about all the things that you have been doing over the last few years. I am a huge proponent of some of the things that you are doing. Before we do that, with everything else on the show, I need to ask you, what is one of your company’s strategies for escaping the revenue maze?

Have a weekly cashflow call. I’m a marketing, business development, sales, and idea generator. I like to be on that side of the business. I have to look at the finances and deal with the financial and revenue maze. I try to limit that. I have a bookkeeper now. I use analytics solutions. Every Monday, we have our call, and I dread it. We have gotten efficient over the last few years. We get through it. I know what is coming in, going out, projecting, budgeting, and all that good stuff.

Tell me a little bit about why you decided that that was the biggest thing to get you out of the revenue maze.

I invested in developing a technology platform. I hired somebody to manage it. I got knee-deep in that and realized that there were off-the-shelf things that we could use. I didn’t want to develop a technology. When we found that, I pulled the plug on it, but I didn’t watch the expense close enough and turned around one day. I went, “Where are my cash reserves? How am I going to pay for this?” It sucked.

It was horrible. It kept me up at night and I was stressed about it. After that, I talked to them. They said, “Are you doing a cashflow?” I’m like, “I know what a cashflow is, but I’m not enough on it that I can figure out exactly where the cash is at any moment.” They said, “Let’s do a weekly cashflow call.” I get on. I still get some checks from clients. I prep those deposits. He takes things in and out of what has hit the bank account and what is expected. We come up with a number right then and know what is coming in and what checks need to be cut or what electronic payments need to be made.

I’m sure that you are aware. For what I do as a fractional chief revenue officer, you watch a lot of that for the future. One of the big statistics even of this show is that 99% of small businesses fail in the first 1 to 5 years. I bet you know the highest statistic as to why they fail. Do you know?

No.

Cashflow.

I was going to say, “Not bringing the revenue in or not getting clients.” That’s right. They are not managing the cashflow. That is what got me. I was ten years into the business when I lost control of that and had to say, “I need a process.” Isn’t that interesting?

It is. You are in marketing and in all these wonderful things. The other statistic is that there is not enough exposure to keep cashflow going, which is tied to what you are doing. It is exciting because 99% of the businesses in the United States and the UK are small businesses. It is almost identical statistics. When you say to get out of it, people will say, “Why does revenue affect that? Why would that affect your show?” If you don’t have revenue coming in, there is no cashflow. You can make strategic decisions based on if you are monitoring that. They go together 100% to me. You will get a CFO, and they will go, “If you don’t have any income coming in of any kind of stuff, there is no cashflow.”

What I’m interested in the revenue side is how much farther the buyer gets on the decision-making process before they are closing and how much automation is working, particularly in B2B sales. I hear mixed things about it. I hear B2B companies using automation and other people saying, “It still has to be the human connection.” That is an expensive resource if you are getting somebody to find leads for you.

I’m an opinionated person.

I want to hear those opinions.

I won’t use opinion. I will use history and watching what has been going on and my own experience. There has to be a balance between the two. There are times when the human element doesn’t need to be there, especially in some of the eCommerce and things like that. Humans need automation to increase their capacity. People probably disagree with me, but to get to that digital deluge with all the automation and everything else, you got to have a human being sift through some of it. I haven’t found a good successful way to say, “You only need a human and automation.”

We are starting to use a platform to automate some email outreach and looking for lists. Human has to write messages, think about what is important to the clients, understand the buyer’s journey, and what is going to make us sound different. All of that is part of the human but is it worth paying for the platform and sending out more into that digital mass? Is it better to have somebody doing the old-fashioned phone calls, reaching out individually on LinkedIn, or using a Dux-Soup platform to help connect? What are you seeing or working with people on?

I am a proponent of a mix of them. You have described you need that platform because if I were to go back and I hope Jeb Blount isn’t reading, but I’m a fan. I call it a quiet stalker. He got a lot to say around. Fanatical Prospecting is his book. He talks about that. It is a great book. Sometimes to prospectors, that becomes a Bible. There is a 20/80 rule that he talks about a little bit. That is that, digital and automation. It is the long haul where the human cold calling is going to move that needle.

TRM 4 | Thinking Global

Fanatical Prospecting

When we train sales teams or if I go into a small company and start working with them, I will bring in those cold callers to follow up and to further qualify what is happening. I will use social media platforms to do the broad universe. I will not take automation, the cold callers sift through, and the good leads go further to the closers. That is assuming that you need a B2B sales team. We are talking B2B now. We are not talking about eCommerce complete.

He has a quote, and I hope I don’t get it wrong. It is on the top of my head. He talks about the Laws of Familiarity. When you are talking about the Laws of Familiarity, it takes 20 to 50 touches to get somebody familiar. Once it is familiar, you have a better chance of them closing because we all talk to our friends. There is so much digital deluge, like, “I don’t know which platform to go with.” What is your experience? There are 50,000 of them. You end up asking your best friend for that. It was like, “I use this. What was your experience?” That is where I find that there is so much learning through automation that it can occur, and a human has to help sort that out later.

You got to take the time to set up the process for the automation, but somebody who understands the company and the target has to sift through. Is that one of your cold callers, or is that somebody in marketing? Who is sifting through?

Everybody does it differently. I was on a sales audit with a company. They had moved some of their customer success people under operations. I find that revenue is the overarching they need to work hand in hand. Sometimes a business development, cold caller, or an SDR, sales development rep, those guys will bridge the cap between marketing’s inbound because that is your digital automation, your lead scoring, and all of that stuff to say, “Let’s hand it off to somebody to further qualify.”

At times, an SDR will be under a marketing team, depending on the structure. I don’t structure it that way because I find their KPIs are more in line with the sales side. When you are the chief revenue, you are over marketing sales and new product development services. It buttons them all up so that they are working like a well-oiled machine in that cog. There is no breakdown with it.

Are you seeing people going offshore for the SDRs, still hiring in the US, or outsourcing?

That is why I was so excited about what you do, and we need to get this back to what you do. I have seen success with some offshoring. The challenge is it depends on your base. I’m global. In the United States, if the widget is something that is hard to explain, like a service that you need to go into a challenger model, you are not selling a feature and benefit. It is hard for sometimes the offshore with the language barrier to do that. If you are in the healthcare arena, that gets difficult.

There are groups you can buy as an outsource that will appointment set, but in that space, they need to be able to talk within the cultural vernacular of that language or a preference. If you are speaking to somebody who is Hawaiian-American and they speak English, it needs to back to what you do, be in that dialect, vernacular, or culture.

That is where I find that it depends on how big the deal size is. If you are in the United States and you are outsourcing to Mexico or the Philippines, which is a big one that does a lot of the outsourcing cold calling, or India, sometimes the consumers don’t identify how that cold caller talks and speaks with them. Even when you create a good script for it, then it becomes scripted sounding too.

If you are going to outsource, they need to be part of that sales team. Somehow or another, you got to have it feel like it is seamless for the customer. If it sounds drastically different, it is going to be hard. You know that because that is what you’ve written about. I would like to hear more about you on how you have bridged that and how you’re working that through because you have been in that industry forever. How many years have you been doing what you are doing now with the language and culture?

TRM 4 | Thinking Global

Thinking Global: If you are going to outsource, they need to be part of that sales team. You need to make it feel like it is seamless for the customer. If it sounds drastically different, it is going to be hard.

I bought Rapport International several years ago. The company was around for almost 35 years in 2022. It is exciting with all the changes we have. It is what you are talking about. Global marketing is my specialty. I always like talking to people who are doing marketing and sales, getting their best practices and what they are seeing. I did divert you, and I appreciate all that you shared.

One of the biggest revenue mistakes that we see our clients making is not thinking global from the start and thinking, “I got a big enough market in the United States.” If you look at the eCommerce companies, they are putting information up there. They are getting hits from all over the world. If they are on Amazon, it is providing machine translation, which shows junk on your website or partially translated so you are not going to sell. Pay attention to your metrics and see where people are coming in.

We have had all sorts of clients call in, saying, “I’m getting hits from China, Japan, and Germany. How can I respond by email?” I’m like, “Forget the emails. Let’s look at your website and see how we can take them through the buyer’s journey and make sure that your product or service is ready for them to use.” There is so much potential. All the statistics show that people want to visit websites in their own language. Ninety percent of people say even if they are bilingual, they rather look in their native language. Over half of them will spend more money to get content in their own language, and 75% won’t buy again if they don’t have after-sales support.

90% of bilingual people prefer to visit websites in their native language. Over half of them will spend more money to get content in their own language.

You have to look at a lot of manufactured and consumer products. If you are going into Europe, you need to have a CE safety mark on there. We do a lot of translations of manuals and packaging to make sure they are under the requirements for the CE mark. It has to be high quality because that is your liability. You got to think global from the start. Make sure to use high-quality translation where it counts. My book takes you through a whole process. Why do it? What is the opportunity? How do you develop a strategy? What country to enter and what language? You can even go into other languages in the United States and increase your sales.

Spanish has many speakers here. The US has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world. Even translating your marketing material for the United States is huge. We do a lot of translations into Spanish and French so people can do North American packaging. It covers Mexico, the United States, the bilingual market in the United States, and Canada if you have French labeling.

People buy for their reasons. If you give them any reason not to buy, there is that challenge. You were like, “What does that mean?” We all love diversity, inclusion, and all of those things, but we can’t stop a consumer from having their first ten seconds of perception and making a decision, and if they see something in the language that doesn’t identify with them because they are comfortable. If you think about how you are comfortable being around your family, that language and whole communication are what makes people feel comfortable with what that is.

We talked about healthcare. In the United States, the top fifteen languages in their state have to have it all translated, but taking it further with some of the ACO and payers where they will create care journals within the cultural aspect of that same language. I love what you’re doing. That is amazing, and that is difficult. What is your biggest challenge with it?

The biggest challenge is finding people that understand the importance of quality translation. There is so much easy access to Google Translator and machine translation. People don’t speak the other language. They go, “This is cool. The machine can handle it. Machines handle so much for us now.” They don’t understand how clunky it is and even the navigation.

I went to a website from China. I was playing around. I was looking to see if they had a translation. I could see the Google plugin. I did the dropdown, and all the languages were in Chinese. I couldn’t figure out where I had to navigate to get to the English. I could click on them and play around, but nobody else is going to do that. I wasn’t going to buy. I was doing my industry research on how it would be.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have been on English websites. If we go to build with and run a list of which websites have the Google Translate plugin in them, it comes up with hundreds of thousands of websites with that in there. A lot of governments are using them. That makes me worried because there have been liability cases against governments for using Google Translate. It has been against hospitals because there have been real fatalities because of that. I can talk about that next, but with the whole DEI push, what is got to be included in there is language. If you are not treating people equally and giving them access to it, you are going to have problems there.

If you are not treating people equally and not giving them access to content they can actually understand, your business will have problems with the whole DEI push.

I’m a huge fan of DEI because it used to be the right thing to do, but now there is so much research out there that shows you that companies perform better. They are more creative. They had better cultures when they got diversity, equity, and inclusion included. It is just not diversity. You got to make people make sure they feel welcome.

The revenues go up from that because they understand who their buyers are. They got people internally that can communicate that. There is a great Pepperidge Farm story about their cookies. The marketing team or the development team says, “How come Latinos don’t buy Pepperidge Farm?” They said, “You don’t have our favorite flavor. You don’t have strawberries.” They created a strawberry cookie and it flew off the shelves in certain areas.

I lived in the Cayman Islands for a number of years. It is a tiny island with a cultural melting pot. We didn’t have the luxury back in 2004 that we do now with all the internet and those kinds of things. It was pre-iPhone. That will tell you the shift. For me, it was eye-opening because we had Cuban refugees pull up to our dock. We had all of these things that my children got that great exposure to. You realize you are not the center of the universe.

I have lived in twenty gazillion different places. I have a place here in Wallace, Idaho. Their mayor declared them the center of the universe, which is a joke, but to them, it is real. It is a town of 2,000 people, and they have a festival around it. We are a global community. We have been a global community. What you are doing creates such a great bridge for all of us.

The other thing that gets me is anybody who is doing global business and says, “English is the global language.” You are fooling yourself. I read a research study about a Japanese company that looked into the productivity of their workers. They found out that the Japanese executives who could speak English fine were spending half their time deciphering emails to figure out what to do. Can you imagine having to spend that much time reading emails? We get too many already, and it seems almost impossible. How do I put my email into Japanese if I don’t speak English back and forth?

I do a lot of training on how to make your companies more inclusive across languages. There are ways that you can build to communicate. It will be easier. There is always telephone interpreting if you have to have a quick call. It is inexpensive. There are no setup charges or monthly fees. You pay by the minute from when you have somebody on. There are lots of little tricks on how you handle a multilingual workforce. We have a case study in Boston Centerless on our website that gives a lot of information about that.

I could have used that at my last full-time equivalent because that is an issue. I’m glad to know about that.

With people having such a hard time hiring, it is an untapped resource. A manufacturing company hire, pay good wages, have job stability, and offers benefits. Oftentimes, it is continuing education. There is room for advancement. People don’t speak English. If they are people who pay attention to detail and are hard workers, and if you can figure out how to train them, which we can help you with, you can hire and have a loyal workforce because it is a good job they can have here in the United States or whatever country you are reading this.

I’m already ticking things in my head that goes, “I could use them for this. I could use them for that.” Even as a fractional CRO, I am setting up a company with a business partner out of Scotland. The reason that we are doing that is that I love the ITR economic reports, and I study them on a regular basis. They have talked about recession-proofing and where you go when there is a recession. My 5-year and 10-year plans are strategically placing certain things in different countries. I have a little bit of diversification, even as a small company. I’m a small company.

One of my goals is to provide opportunities. You provide opportunity on top of it, but how do you go into some of the megacities in Africa? There are all the different tribes and languages there. ITR recommended learning French. I thought, “I’m from California. I will learn Spanish.” For the global, you should be looking at French. With your business, I could get an interpreter on there that do the French for me.

I started a couple of presentations to new exporters. How many languages do you need to know to export efficiently? Sometimes people will think about it. They will say 2 or 3. They speak Spanish and Chinese. It is the first time I have heard French, but it makes sense. My premise is you are running a business. When are you going to have time to sit down and learn that many languages well enough to do business?

You are lucky if you can hire people. If you are bilingual in the United States or a high schooler reading this, get bilingual immediately because people want to hire you. My premise is setting up efficient translation, and interpretation is not a cost. You are getting an ROI on that. Once you get the process down, you can duplicate it across other languages.

Setting up efficient translation and interpretation is not a cost. You are getting ROI on that. Once you get the process down, you can duplicate it across other languages.

It is a similar business model to what I put out when I say fractional leadership. There is a point where a company needs to bring in a full-time equivalent. They need to bring in whatever that is if they are a certain size. There is a point where small businesses can benefit from that knowledge of all the years and hire somebody fractionally to go in and fix that.

We do that all the time with CFOs. We don’t think that you can outsource revenue leadership. You don’t think all the time that that doesn’t come up. When you were talking about it, it was like, “I could hire that interpreter.” It is outsourcing because the return on investment is higher than when I hire a full-time equivalent to constantly be on my side. It is the same methodology.

There are little tricks you can do. We had clients, what I’m thinking of in particular, manufactured a specialty material. They went over to Korea to present to the government these specialty materials for the police or military. They were the only ones that translated their presentation because all their negotiations had been done in English. They ended up winning the deal because they were the only ones that translated their presentation and made the people feel included. They understood what was going on.

Even if you are going international and you know the people speak English, but you are in Spain, France, or Africa, and it isn’t their native language, translate your presentation. That is baby step number one that goes huge. You can also reuse that content on your website. If you are doing a sales presentation, in particular, all content that you could have on there is a downloadable asset or a landing page.

TRM 4 | Thinking Global

Thinking Global: Even if you are speaking to people whose native language isn’t English, translate your presentation. You can even reuse that content on your website.

That is another good thing that I hadn’t even thought of. Jen Allen is with the Challenger group, which I’m a big fan of. She had posted talking about sales being like dating. It was funny because I had coached a sales rep before you asked for the failed, take about date a little bit. It is the same thing as what you were saying. I’m drawing the comparison because it honors people. You are always on your best behavior when you are dating. I haven’t dated for several years. You try to cater to the person that you are talking to.

You want to click and get along.

What excites you about the future?

I joined EO a couple of years back. It is an entrepreneur’s organization. I love that because I’m connected to business owners around the world. I’m learning so much. It is ironic because they are taking off the blinders of what my revenue goals were to grow to. I’m like, “I could do that.” That excites me in the future. I know where I wanted to get to. I’m like, “I could do double that.” The other thing was when I started off, I had a small team. Now I got an amazing team. For each person we add in, it is fun to see the culture developing, how people support each other and how we are all learning new things. That has been fun over the last few years.

I have not attended that organization, but I have a lot of people I know that do. I have done Vistage, but I understand it is fantastic. I have looked at potentially signing up with them because of all the good things I have heard from that organization, especially for the entrepreneur. Tell me a little bit from little you to now. How did you get to where you are now? What took you there?

From little me or how I ended up exactly here?

Was there a defining moment that said, “I want to be in language and doing what I’m doing now?” What moved you in that direction?

I lived in Mexico, Taiwan, and the Philippines when I was growing up. I have always loved languages, and cultures, getting along with people and trying to figure out how to communicate even if I don’t speak their language. At one point, I said to my dad in high school, “I like to be an interpreter.” He said, “Get to be bilingual and specialize in a topic.” It is the advice I give people when I’m in the industry.

I never got to be fully bilingual. I found that I love the language of business. When I got out of undergrad from Penn State, I thought I was going to go back to law school, but I ended up getting into sales and loving that because you are on the happy side of the business. You are not on the legal side. I was in all sorts of business-to-business services in selling. I owned a company before I went to business school at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Coming out of there, I went into senior roles in global marketing and business development.

I was laid off on both maternity leaves. I don’t want to work for anybody else anymore. A VC company that can sell and move to someplace else, a large global company that decides to eliminate its corporate marketing department. I said, “I want to go back to owning my own business because I can balance my family and my life.”

I ran into somebody who said, “Buy a business.” I laughed, and I was like, “What money?” I worked in the portfolio companies of venture capital firms, but I started daydreaming. I searched buy a business. This little language company came up. The seller wanted to do something else. She said, “It responds well to marketing.” I said, “It got a similar business model to what I did before.” Lo and behold, I became the owner. Ten years after that, I bought another company, and I’m looking at acquiring another one. I bought my way into something I was interested in. I did it because I wanted to be able to balance my life better.

Everybody wants that model. That is the whole work from anywhere. You are the happen in person. My kids always say, “Mom, you were Pinterest before Pinterest was a thing. You were the work from anywhere before it was a thing.”

We were virtual before there was a cloud. I remember hearing about the cloud. I’m like, “We do that.” It has gotten easier. I can remember researching several years ago about how you build a culture for a virtual team. All this stuff is coming out. I’m like, “That might work. I wish I had it then.”

I have been paperless since 2001. It was a good thing. When we were living in the Cayman Islands, the whole island got hit by a category-five hurricane that decimated it. Everybody who had paper, photos, and everything else, I had an external hard drive that was probably 12×12 inches. We got these little things because I didn’t like file cabinets, and I didn’t like that you couldn’t search for things easily in a file. You had to remember your system.

I like that crutch of being able to search. I was grateful that when we were in Cayman, that was the case. Skype was coming online, but it was spotty at best at the time. The internet was spotty at best. That was the day of the life drive from Palm. I have done a presentation that is called So Long Palm, and how they went into it obscurity because of Apple and new product development.

I have my old PalmPilot. He said I should keep it. It is going to be an antique. I’m like, “Really?”

You were like, “I should have kept it because these crazy people buy these things.” What advice would you give to some of the people who are reading that are trying to move in that direction?

Reach out to me. You can do it on our website, which is Rapport Translations. Rapport is the French word. I can connect you to a direct person in your state that can give you free advice on how to export and how to get a grant to support your global marketing efforts. Either reach out to me on the website, or you can go to my Linktr.ee.

Linktr.ee is where I keep all my links. I love this platform. It is a free place to keep all your links. If you prefer LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever, you can connect with me on any of those Linktree. It is Linktr.ee/WendyPease. You can get a few free chapters of the book or connect to the Global Marketing Show Podcast I host if you want to hear from other people that are doing it. You can contact me and find our website. It is a great place to go.

I’m already taking notes because I’m like, “I would love to figure out how to get some marketing grants for my global company that I’m setting up the mini-mes around the world. We need to have a conversation around that. Did you tell the people the name of your book?

TRM 4 | Thinking Global

The Language of Global Marketing: Translate Your Domestic Strategies into International Sales and Profits

Maybe you said I was an author. It is called The Language of Global Marketing.

Make sure you plug your book because that is got to be an amazing thing. I put it on my list. I work out and listen to books. That is how I get to 5 million of them.

You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any of the places. I recorded the audio version in a wine cellar in my basement that I use for storing gifts. That doesn’t last long enough in a wine cellar, but it has good audio.

This has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much. I want to thank Wendy Pease. She gave all her plugs of where you can go. We learned a little bit about the globe. I got 7 or 8 nuggets that I’m going to take back for myself and my company. I’m grateful to you and to everybody who reads this blog. Thank you again, Wendy.

It has been my pleasure talking to you, Valerie. We will schedule time after this so I can introduce you to the person in Idaho. I’m looking forward to it.

This has been another great episode. Thank you so much, and see you guys next episode.

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About Wendy Pease

Wendy Pease

Wendy Pease is the Language Translation Expert at Rapport International. She is also the author of “The Global Language of Marketing: Translate Your Domestic Strategies Into International Sales and Profits”. Wendy sits down with host Valerie Cobb to talk about ways to increase your profits and put your business on an upward trajectory.

Here at Revenue NorthStar, we are passionate about sharing experiences and first-hand knowledge from the trenches. No fake gurus or consultants; we get into the execution of well-proven steps, strategies, and frameworks to help your business grow faster and more efficiently. Stay connected with us on social media for regular updates, tips, and insights:

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About The Author : Valerie Cobb

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