Our Analysts' Insights

For language service providers, finding the right way to stand out in a crowded marketplace is a lot like navigating the breakfast cereal aisle at your local grocery store. This aisle is a tapestry of colors, characters, flavors, and promises, each box vying for your attention and attempting to persuade you of its unique benefits. Whether it’s the health-conscious options that emphasize whole grains and fiber, the kid-friendly boxes with cartoon mascot illustrations, or the luxury granolas that...

FOMO – the fear of missing out – relates to the anxiety people feel when they are worried about missing out on opportunities. Companies are not immune to this phenomenon. And many LSPs have a bad case of it – even if they aren’t aware of it.

Cold emailing is the equivalent of cold calling – the solicitation of a potential customer who had no prior interaction with a salesperson – and is simply handled by email. It means you reach out to a sales target without them having made the first move. And that’s why it amounts to shooting an arrow in the dark. Why? The prospect doesn’t know you. Your email may land in a spam filter or remain unread even if it was delivered. Cold emailing is a tough exercise. Sometimes your arrow will hit,...

Do you have low click-through rates on your marketing emails? Do prospects fail to reach out after you’ve sent them what you felt was a compelling call for action? You could attribute the lack of response to a variety of problems, but one commonly identified by our analyst team in interactions with language service providers is that many LSPs lack a targeted approach. A little planning could significantly improve the results of marketing and sales efforts.

Growth is an evergreen topic for language service providers (LSPs). Those that struggle to increase revenue want to figure out how to formalize their sales function, while those that already have positive sales numbers want to grow more or do it more sustainably. The fourth quarter is sales and marketing prime-time. Not only it is a critical to finish the year strong, but it’s also the perfect time to focus on the year ahead.

Language service providers often tell CSA Research that they struggle to get visibility and brand recognition. They feel that their marketing and sales efforts fall on deaf ears so meeting sales targets becomes difficult.

It’s almost impossible to open one’s email or social media feed without skimming one or more messages entreating the reader to “follow the path to digital transformation” or to “recognize how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing digital transformation.” But how much attention should LSPs pay to what’s going on in this area? CSA Research recently launched an initiative to find out. In the meantime, here’s what our preliminary results show.

A strong website that delivers a clear and compelling message, tailored to your specific audience can help drive sales. It must succeed in both its content and its technical structure. In June 2017, CSA Research examined 305 websites from language service providers in depth.

Are you wasting sales and marketing resources going after the wrong leads? Many language service providers (LSPs) aren’t sure which prospects to pursue, so they market to a broad spectrum of buyers, with little in common, and which cross company sizes, industries, geographies, and countless other attributes. The more LSPs struggle to grow in a predictable fashion, the more they talk about hiring additional salespeople, redesigning incentive plans, and going after any prospect – good or bad.