Sales Messages “Lost in Translation”

Shortly after my post about how spelling errors can cause your buyers in another country to dismiss your company as “unprofessional,” comes this post at Harvard Business about sales emails that are “lost in translation.”

Nadia Nassif writes about two kinds of problems in sales emails: first, spelling and grammar errors; and second, using a generic message that is not personalized to address your potential client’s needs.  She has a great example of an email she received, and how she would re-write it to increase its effectiveness. Check it out here.

I think there is another message in this example that still needs to be teased out, about the challenges of using new social media channels in cross-cultural selling.  (The email in her example was written by someone who is in a LinkedIn group and referenced a discussion there.)  There’s lots of excitement and interest about using social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to enhance the relationship-building process and increase overall sales effectiveness (see this discussion of Sales 2.0).  These tools tend to have a culture and style of their own and, no surprise, they vary across different countries and cultures.  Trying to follow the style that fits both the channel and the regional culture of your intended prospects requires extremely careful attention to nuance.  What makes it more tricky is that, to be effective, web 2.0 messages should be highly personalized – that’s the whole point, users are involved in relationships, not just taking in one-way pushed content.  That means you can’t count on the carefully crafted sales messaging put together by your marketing team, each message should be unique, and the risk of communication gaffes across languages increases significantly.  How can globalized businesses use these tools effectively to sell across cultures?

Why Spelling Matters in Sales

When my daughter attended a local school in Pune, India, we heard from several of her teachers that they were concerned that her “writing is poor.”  Eventually we figured out that what they really meant was that her handwriting was poor – it didn’t live up to the standards for beautiful, flowing, precise handwriting that are expected of every Indian student who seeks to pass the Indian board exams.  Since we intended to return to the US and our daughter would not be taking the Indian boards, this was not a concern for us.  But that didn’t mean her teachers weren’t influenced by her handwriting; good handwriting is a key requirement for Indian students, so it’s one sign that Indian teachers use to evaluate the quality and commitment of their students, and it was clear that their perception of her as a student was influenced by her American scribble.

Why am I bringing this up? There’s an analogy here with spelling and grammatical errors in business emails and presentations for American clients.  One element in how prospective clients form an opinion of individuals and the companies they represent is the quality of their written communications.  If English is not your first language or if, like Indians, your English usage is different than American English usage, your written communications are likely to have more spelling and grammatical errors than those of your peers who grew up in the United States.  It’s neither logical nor fair to evaluate the quality of your business offerings on the basis of your spelling, but it still influences how your American clients perceive you, even when they don’t think it should.  A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that “Spelling and grammatical errors indicate a lack of professionalism that can get in the way of your success.”

How do spelling and grammatical errors influence your American prospects?  Unfortunately, it gives them exactly the kind of message you don’t want them to get.   Like the individual in the WSJ article, you and your company may “risk being perceived by senior leaders as immature, illiterate or lacking attention to detail.”  If you are selling offshore services, you need to build confidence in your prospects that their business will be in good hands, that it will receive your highest attention, and that you will be able to communicate effectively in writing, particularly via email, the most common global communication mode.

Ask an American friend or colleague who is a business professional to review some of your written materials such as  introductory emails or presentations.  What do they see?  Do they pick up on small errors you miss?  How does it affect their overall impression?  Ask them to be honest!

The good news is that this is relatively simple to fix: Get all of your standard materials reviewed and corrected by one of your American colleagues who notices these errors (not everyone does).  If you’re in a larger company, make this part of someone’s job description, to provide QA on all marketing and sales materials prior to sending them out (most big consulting companies make it a standard practice for all presentations to go through a department dedicated to this QA).  Develop standard templates and messaging that can be pre-reviewed, and use these when developing new materials.  Turn on the spell-check in your email program, and don’t let anything go out without using it.

Good Ideas for US businesses from India?

I’ve recently noticed a few  articles on a related theme – lessons that American businesses can learn from India.  Experiences in another culture or country are often the source of innovative ideas, and tapping this idea stream is one very good reason for developing a truly globalized business model (vs. a multi-country business, where each region operates as a silo).   All too often, American businesses can, like the stereotypical American tourist, focus on what they do better, and ignore the opportunities for learning from other countries.  We tend to assume that because a developing economy has more poverty or poor infrastructure, that they are “behind” the US and there is only a one-way learning process (see some of the comments on Navi Radjour’s article, mentioned below).  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I wrote about one example of this at John Deere here.  Here are some other examples in recent articles:

In an HBS blog post, Navi Radjour wrote about this concept broadly, arguing that ‘the US must learn to receive India’s “smart power” as much as it is willing to bestow its own onto India.’ He then went on to cite two examples – SELCO in the clean energy sector, and Aravind Eye Care hospitals in the healthcare sector.  These are examples of companies that have developed an innovative product (or process, in Aravind’s case) to greatly reduce costs, which expands the market for these products dramatically.  I don’t think either company’s products are directly transferable to the US market as is, but there is an opportunity to leverage the products or ideas to offer lower cost rural electricity and eye surgery in the U.S.

In another example, Gunjan Bagla wrote about how much better the customer service is on Indian airlines (at least, Kingfisher and Jet Air), versus on American airlines.  This is true of the quality of service in many Indian businesses targeted at upper income segments, such as department stores, hotels, car services, etc.  I think this is partly because these services are really luxury services in India, while they are commodity services in the U.S., and are able to support a higher level of staffing and customer attention.   Nonetheless, if I were in the airline business, I would look at Kingfisher and Jet Air along with Singapore Airlines and Southwest Airlines as great examples to learn from, regardless of the country in which they practice.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece earlier this summer discussing the values and lifestyle of the generation of Indians who left India in the 60s and 70s as a positive example for others to follow in the current economic crisis.  The piece had the same nostalgic tone as those written about the values of those who lived through the Depression in the U.S., yet it was interesting to see a positive spin on the limited resources in India at the time.