Episode 77 – It comes down to understanding what the problem is

My guest on the show today is Matt Hauser. Matt is the Senior Vice President at TransPerfect. Focused on helping...

The post Episode 77 – It comes down to understanding what the problem is appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is Matt Hauser. Matt is the Senior Vice President at TransPerfect. Focused on helping companies launch into global markets online, he’s in charge of sales and marketing for TransPerfect’s GlobalLink Technology Suite, which is in use by over 4,000 companies worldwide involved in language services industry for 18 years.

Adam: [00:08] Hi. Welcome to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast, a podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways Eight, a digital marketing agency and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events to build forty eight websites for forty eight nonprofits in forty eight hours.

[00:28] My guest on the show today is Matt Hauser. Matt is the Senior Vice President at TransPerfect. Focused on helping companies launch into global markets online, he’s in charge of sales and marketing for TransPerfect’s GlobalLink Technology Suite, which is in use by over 4,000 companies worldwide involved in language services industry for 18 years. Matt, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Welcome to the show.

Matt: [00:53] Adam, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Adam: [00:55] It’s going to be a fun conversation, man. I love people that are involved in products. I like products. Products are always really interesting and how we market products is really interesting, too. So that’s kind of fun. So is there anything you want to add to that bio before we dive into our questions?

Matt: [01:11] No, I think that’s pretty good. I mean, I’ve been focused on the technology side of our business for probably the last 10 years, but I have been involved in language services, more commonly known to a lay person as translation services, for almost 20 years.

Adam: [01:29] Oh, that’s fantastic. Okay. Well, let’s dive in then. So, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something that has worked well for you?

Matt: [01:37] Sure. From our perspective, I guess there’s two sides to that, right? There’s what we’ve done as an organization and there was also some of the things that I’ve seen our customers doing as we’ve been working with them on their global digital marketing efforts. So from our side of things, what we’ve really tried to focus on, you mentioned being involved on the product side. We’ve tried to really take what is generally a pretty esoteric concept to a lot of people, which is globalization management, and refine that from marketing perspective to make it very business case focused. So a lot less focused on the bells and whistles of how a product works that we have that’s designed to optimize people’s global supply chain when it comes to translation, but more focused on what is the benefit that it actually drives for a customer that’s using it.

[02:34] So taking a concept that could be very technical and boiling it down into something as simple as, “Hey, does it save me money? Does it save me time? Does it help me get a leg up on my competition?” And sort of shaping our stories around the product in that way. And I think it’s been a very effective way for us to capture an audience that if we tried to spend a lot of time explaining all the nuts and bolts of how globalization management actually works, we probably, A, put a lot of people to sleep. And also, they’re not necessarily going to grasp onto those concepts as much as the three that I just mentioned.

Adam: [03:11] Well, yeah, I love that, too, because people try to sell to me a lot and they want to get on a call and then they want to dig into all these bells and whistles about the software that I really — I don’t care about the bells and whistles. What I care about is like, tell me how this is going to grow my company, give me the big picture and then we’ll figure out the details down the road. I’ll understand how your software is so cool later on and I’ll see your fancy UX later on and all that sort of stuff. But like just give me the brass tacks; how is this going to help me overall and then let’s talk about the details later. Right? And so I really love that that’s your approach.

Matt: [03:45] Wait. Yeah, exactly. And I think it really just comes down to understanding what the problem is and that’s what we have spent a lot of time doing in our conversations with customers is, “Let’s talk about what your business problem is and very much further downstream, you get into those details, the granular elements.” But if you can’t clearly articulate the business problem and understand what the solution is to the business problem, all of those downstream conversations really are irrelevant. Right? And if you start with the details and try to work your way back up, it’s just not a very effective way of communicating your (04:23 inaudible).

Adam: [04:24] That’s right. You got to understand the problem first and then create the solution around the problem; not try to fit the solution to an existing problem. That doesn’t really work very well. So I love that. I love that.

Matt: [04:33] Exactly.

Adam: [04:35] Okay, man, that’s great. I really love that. I love that that’s your approach and the way you’re thinking about it. It felt like too few sales people are thinking that way. So that’s really great.

[04:43] So question number two: Related to digital marketing, can you tell me something that has not worked well that we can learn from?

Matt: [04:53] Well, I think it’s kind of tied into what we just mentioned in the first part, right? They sort of go hand in hand. I think that the natural inclination that you have when you’re looking at marketing a product versus a service is spending a lot of time talking about the features and not enough time talking about the benefits. And I think initially for us, especially a market at the time, just to take you back a few years and give you like a quick snapshot of the globalization management technology market. Ten years ago, people that were interested in these solutions, and really what the solutions do is they make the translation process more efficient. They reduce the amount of project management that people need to invest to deal with things in multiple languages. They improve language quality and they also provide some transparency into a process that was normally fairly [05:52 unclear] for people. Right?

[05:53] But the people that were interested in these kinds of solutions 10 years ago were very, very hardcore translation-focused people. They were localization managers at software companies or documentation managers at automotive companies that have lived and breathed this for a long time. And the outreach to them was more feature-based, right? But what’s really happened in the world of digital marketing on the customer side for us is that now, when people are looking at building their digital marketing strategy, they’re really looking at building a global digital marketing strategy. And these are people that are not necessarily translation experts but they understand that there’s a lot of value in them trying to figure out how to launch their brand in a market like China or getting into the EU or South America or anywhere else. And that becomes a very fundamental core piece of how they’re building that strategy.

[07:00] So for us to be able to have the conversation with them about, “Hey, you’re focused on content right now. You’re focused on, I have something English, I want to put it into Spanish.” That’s one very small part of the equation. The bigger part of the equation is all of the other things that go along with it. And from a digital marketing perspective, you’re using a content management system or you’re using an email marketing platform and that’s where all of your content lives and how can we actually talk about that piece because when it really comes down to it, that’s the bigger challenge. Getting something from English into Spanish is a subjective process where you’re going to translate something and you’re going to work through it and you’re going to try to make sure that things are on topic and on brand. But once that’s done, the process is relatively simple as you continue to add new content.

[07:55] What gets more and more complex is we have a new system that we have where things live or we’re doing these campaigns and now we have IT involved and I’ve got to get ten different project managers to help me do this because now I’m in fifteen different markets. And so again, it’s sort of tied into the first part, which is we had to change the way that we were positioning the product, really because the audience that was consuming our product was changing and, thankfully, it was growing and expanding so it was a overall positive thing for us.

Adam: [08:28] Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s good when you have to begin to focus and change how you pitch your product because your market is expanding quickly. That’s the problem that everyone is facing.

Matt: [08:37] Yeah. Not a bad problem to have.

Adam: [08:38] Right. That’s great. I love that. And I love how you’re talking about if you focus, my note here said if you focus too granularly in your thinking, then you’re going to miss the bigger picture. Right? And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at. If you focus on the one item you’re trying to translate but you’re not dealing with the systems around that, then you’re really not solving the problem for the long term. Right?

Matt: [09:00] Absolutely, yeah. And also really to be perfectly honest about it, the people that are the decision makers that are looking to implement technology solutions, they’re not really as concerned about those low-level details. Like that is more of an operational at the project manager level. Like a senior level person, a vice president or a senior level person that is making the approval to implement a new system, they really just care about those three things that I mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, right? Does it save me money? Does it save me time? Does it give me a leg up on my competition? Does it help me do things more efficiently? And if you check those boxes, then the other things work themselves out downstream in the process.

Adam: [09:54] Absolutely. Yeah, they really do. I think that’s great. Okay. And my last question, love this one: Related to digital marketing, can you tell me something you are excited about?

Matt: [10:03] Oh, wow. There’s a bunch of things that are very exciting. I think one of the things for us and just in general, I think the rise of video content as a way to engage with customers is very effective. And it’s not just in terms of targeting millennials, but really I think everyone is consuming content very differently now online and responding to video content in a much more positive way. And so I just think there’s a lot of very cool things that are happening with video and the delivery of that content and being able to tailor specific messages to targeted customers using video and kind of — so combining, I think, video and personalization and having that genuine connection that you can make with a client in a way that email or having something on your website just in regular text, it doesn’t really work as well.

[11:10] And from a business perspective for us, the exciting thing about that is as video continues to grow as a way to engage customers in digital marketing channel or in any other number of channels that are out there, the need for having video in other languages, whether you’re subtitling it or doing a voiceover, that’s increasing as well and that’s becoming a very large part of our business is helping customers take that video content and now moving into other languages with it. I think the other part, and I think this is probably a buzzword that you’ve heard many times from people that you’ve interviewed on this podcast, but the artificial intelligence piece is fascinating and there’s a number of different elements of it that impact our business. One of them is around how artificial intelligence improves machine translation, right?

Adam: [12:13] Oh, yeah.

Matt: [12:15] And for people that are not as clued in about machine translation, think about a Google Translate or a Microsoft Translate, those products out there, those are all being, right now, supercharged with artificial intelligence and neural technologies that it’s not going to replace the requirement for human translators, at least in the near term. I think if it ever does, then we’ll all be enslaved by the machines and we won’t have to worry about anything else anyway. But what it’s doing from a marketing perspective is it is giving people a low cost entry point to test the waters of moving into other markets without a major upfront investment and to gauge the effectiveness of global content in their marketing strategy. Whereas before, it may have been prohibitively expensive to translate an entire website with skilled human translators that were subject matter experts. That would be cost-prohibitive to a smaller organization.

[13:25] But now, these organizations can engage and we actually have invested a lot in our own neural MT solutions that we’re deploying for a lot of our customers where we can say, “Hey, if this is your budget, you can move into these markets. You can gauge what the effectiveness is of this content. We can actually use analytics to look at what pages or what content is driving the most amount of value for it and maybe we slide the scale of quality up on those high value pages or high value products or whatever is driving the most amount of traffic for you. We can apply that higher quality process to that and, meanwhile, expand your footprint using this artificial intelligence combined with machine translation to help you see what the impact is of being in the market.” So I think that, and there’s a lot of other pieces around AI that are not language specific, around automating workflows and understanding profiles and personas. And so it’s just very cool and I think we’re really just scratching the surface of what that technology —

Adam: [14:35] Man, this is great. Matt, let me see if I can recap just some notes that I’ve taken here as we’ve been chatting. So related to digital marketing, what has worked well? You said taking an esoteric concept and make a business-case focus instead. So it’s not so much about how the product works, but it’s about the benefit that it drives and I think your quote was, “It comes down to understanding what the business problem is.” And so you’re pitching your software really not based on features but really based on how it solves problems for people, which is certainly more compelling and really just better, I think, all around in the long run.

[15:12] For question number two, as far as what has not worked well that we can learn from, you said spending too much time focusing on the features and not enough time talking about the benefits has been a problem and then focusing too granularly when thinking about language and global reach rather than focusing and thinking about systems that will create sustainable structures to make that possible in the long run. I think it’s really smart and we need to, as organizations think in terms of systems, to create sustainable structures. And so that’s great.

[15:40] And then question number three, what are you excited about related to digital marketing? The rise of video content as a way to engage with customers is very effective. And you also mentioned combining video and personalization to create a more genuine connection with the client. And I really liked that a lot. I think there’s a lot of power in video. I think there’s a lot of new technologies that are starting to make video easier and easier for every size of business. And so I think video is going to become a lot more powerful, a lot more customized as well as everything else in marketing is becoming. So that’s great. How was that summary? Did I miss anything and do you have anything you want to add to that?

Matt: [16:17] Your summary was a lot more compelling than when I said it. So nice work.

Adam: [16:22] Well, it all came from you, my friend. That all came from you, so I’m just regurgitating your words. So that’s great. Well, do you have any final thoughts you want to share with the audience?

Matt: [16:31] In terms of digital marketing strategies — sorry, there’s a fire truck that’s right outside my window.

Adam: [16:40] No worries, man. Just as long as your building’s not on fire, we’re all good, buddy.

Matt: [16:43] As far as I can tell, they haven’t sounded the alarm yet but I can hang out for a couple extra minutes even if they do. So yeah, I just think the other thing that we didn’t really touch on that I think is worth noting is this concept that, again, it’s probably become a little bit of a cliched buzzword, but the content marketing piece and really using this concept of creating something that really is a kind of a thought leadership piece that helps to drive forward the value proposition of your product and service and allowing people to consume something in a way that is really not a sales piece, but it’s getting them to think about what’s happening in their organization a little differently and maybe picking their interest to look at solutions in a different way that maybe they didn’t think of before.

Adam: [17:41] Yeah.

Matt: [17:42] So I think that’s another great piece that’s out there. But from a marketing perspective, there’s just ton of exciting things out there. I’m very fortunate to be involved with a fantastic marketing team that we have here at TransPerfect and I also have the benefit of being able to work with a lot of marketing leadership at our clients because marketing is driving a lot of these decisions that our customers are making to move into different markets. So I kind of get the best of both worlds and it’s a really cool position to be in.

Adam: [18:18] Nice. I love that. I love that. And I agree with you. I think that content marketing is — I mean, the best content tends to be king and the people that are out there that get the most conversations and the most attention are the ones that are creating the best and most content. And so if we can create great content, I mean, a lot of things fall into place along with that, I believe. So, yeah, that’s really, really great.

Matt: [18:42] Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.

Adam: [18:44] Matt, man, this has been great. I really appreciate having your insight, having you on the show. I’d love to have you back sometime and thanks so much for joining me today.

Matt: [18:52] Sure. Anytime, Adam. I appreciate it. Thanks again.

Adam: [18:58] Thanks for listening to the Good People. Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, your host, you can find me on Twitter, @AJWalker; and on my blog at adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit-building and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks and tune in next time.

The post Episode 77 – It comes down to understanding what the problem is appeared first on Sideways8.