Whether you’re looking for agencies or direct clients, it’s always a dilemma whether to contact multiple people within the same company. And if yes, whether to contact them simultaneously, or in a staggered way. A number of people in my recent March Marketing Madness challenge group had this question, so I thought it might be helpful as an article topic!

First, the easy scenarios

This is a nuanced question, so let’s get the easy aspects out of the way first:

• If the potential client is an agency, there’s less stress about bugging them, because you know that, at least in theory, they need you. Agencies can’t do business without translators and interpreters, and their staff are almost always overloaded. Years ago, an agency owner told me, “Follow up until you get a yes or a no,” and that advice is perfect. As I’ve previously described, expect to contact an agency two to six times before you get work from them.
• If the company is tiny, just contact one person at a time. You can usually get a sense of a company’s size from their website or LinkedIn. If LinkedIn lists them as having 1-10 employees (the smallest category on LinkedIn), don’t contact four people at once.
• As with most things in life, remind yourself that other people don’t think about you as much as you envision that they do. In fact, strangers barely think about you at all. Much less do they gossip at the office, “That translator who contacted THREE PEOPLE in our company at the same time! THE NERVE!” Seriously, that’s not a thing that happens.
• Overdoing it isn’t the end of the world. I’m in an orchestra for adult cello learners (shoutout to my fellow mediocre and enthusiastic adult musicians!) and our conductor always tells us this. “When I tell you to play in a different way; louder, softer, more staccato, more legato, your goal should be to make that change dramatic enough that I then tell you to dial it back just a little bit. Like you want me to say, ‘That was definitely louder!! Great!! But next time, make it 10% softer than that’.” The same is true of our marketing: right now, it’s likely that you’re radically under-doing it. Maybe you swing the other way and overdo it a little bit; the potential client notices that you really want to work with them, because you e-mailed seven of their project managers. Honestly, so what? Then dial back.

The dilemma

Here’s where it gets tricky. You identify a good potential direct client, but there are multiple people who look like they might hire freelancers:

• Director of Marketing
• Marketing Manager
• Director of Communications
• Director of International Communications
• Director of Content
• Content Specialist

And so on. Here’s my “finished is better than perfect” strategy.

• Pick three potential contacts. If possible, spread out across departments. In the example above, choose one person from Marketing, one from Communications, and one from Content.
• Create a schedule, by which you contact each of the three people by e-mail, then on LinkedIn, then by e-mail, spacing these touchpoints one week apart for each contact. This will take five weeks.

It looks like:

• Week one: Introductory e-mail to Contact #1
• Week two: Introductory e-mail to Contact #2, LinkedIn connection request to Contact #1
• Week three: Introductory e-mail to Contact #3, LinkedIn connection request to Contact #2, Follow-up e-mail to Contact #1
• Week four: LinkedIn connection request to Contact #3, Follow-up e-mail to Contact #2
• Week five: Follow-up e-mail to Contact #3

This repeatable system makes the contacting less painful, and you’ve now nudged this company nine times. If you’re interested in the specifics, such as how to find e-mail addresses and what to say in these messages, that’s the topic of my April 23 master class, Marketing to direct clients using e-mail and LinkedIn.

I hope this tip is helpful in your own marketing efforts! Have a great week!

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Most of the time when a client thinks I’m too expensive, I just let them move on. I’m fortunate to have enough work, and it’s draining to explain to people why high-quality language services aren’t cheap. But once in a while, I decide to push back a little, and it’s always interesting to see the client’s reaction.

About a week ago, an individual client e-mailed me about a birth certificate translation. I responded that I charge $75 per page, including a certificate of accuracy with my ATA-certified translator stamp on it.

Client: I see online services charging $27 per page; is there any chance we could meet in the middle at $50 per page?

Me: If the online service meets your needs, by all means, use them. However what I’m offering is not just the translation. The fact that I’m ATA-certified (which costs money to prepare for, obtain, and maintain) means that I personally sign the certificate, including my contact information, and I stand behind the translation. If there’s ever an issue, you can contact me personally and I’ll resolve it. It would surprise me if a $27 per page service offers this, but I’m fortunate to be very busy at my regular rates, so I don’t offer discounts.

Client: OK, send me the invoice.

These days, I think it’s easy to get discouraged by the prevailing trends: faster, cheaper, good enough is good enough, go with the cheapest option or just throw it at an AI tool and see if you get caught. And to be fair, a $75 job is different than a $5,000 job. But on a small scale and a large scale, there are still clients who care, and that’s who you want to be working with.

I hope this is helpful! Have a great week.

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Now that March Marketing Madness has wrapped up (for the eighth year in a row, no one died from a continuous month of marketing!), I have two master classes on the calendar for April, both taught by me:

• How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreting exam, a 90-minute session on Thursday, April 16. Registration is $60 and includes the recording. I’ll teach you the process I used to pass (on the first try!) three sets of high-stakes interpreting exams.
• Marketing to direct clients, using e-mail and LinkedIn. A two-hour session on Thursday, April 23. Registration is $75 and includes the recording. Especially if you’re new to direct client marketing, it can help to use tools you already know. We’ll discuss how to create a simple e-mail/LinkedIn/e-mail sequence to help break out of the analysis paralysis that holds a lot of people back!

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In episode 24 of the Training for Translators podcast, based on this blog post, I dissect a common freelance fear of the moment: “I feel dishonest marketing translation services, when clients could just do it themselves for free with AI!” I personally don’t share this concern, and in this episode, I explain why!

Listen in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or right here!

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Free webinar on Friday

On Friday, March 27, guest instructor Samuel Mowry will teach a one-hour free webinar, An introduction to LSP.Expert. If you’re still using spreadsheets for accounting and project tracking, LSP.Expert is a better way! It’s designed by translators, at a fraction of the cost of programs like QuickBooks. Come learn what it’s all about! This session is not a sales pitch; it’s an informational introduction, after which you can try (or not) the free trial of the software. Registration is free and includes the recording.

Also, it’s interpreting exam season! On April 16, I’m teaching How to prepare for (and pass!) an interpreting exam. Registration is $75 and includes the recording.

“I try to motivate myself to market, but then I think…can’t clients just do this themselves with AI??”

It’s a common fear these days. I’ll admit that I don’t share this fear, which makes me either the best, or the worst, person to write about it (we’ll see!!). How do I market my translation services, without feeling like I’m selling something that clients can get for free? Here’s what I’ve heard from a few colleagues:

• “Marketing these days feels dishonest, like I’m hoping clients don’t know that they could just use DeepL”
• “Good enough is good enough for most clients; they’re totally happy with an AI translation and won’t pay for a professional translator”

Here’s what’s not incorrect:

• Just as with any professional service, some clients are happy with “good enough.” Let them carry on with their tolerance for mediocrity while you carry on looking for clients who value excellence, service, and trust.
• For straightforward information in common language combinations, AI does a decent job. Again, that’s not what you’re selling; you’re selling a really well-written translation, done by someone who knows the terminology, the context, the cultural aspect, and is a really good writer (which AI is not).

DIY options aren’t a new thing

If you’re thinking that “software that does a similar task to a professional knowledge worker” is a new thing, like this all started with ChatGPT, it didn’t. Lots of professions exist alongside software that does some version of what the human professionals do. Sometimes, the software does virtually eliminate the professional: very few people these days go to a travel agent for something simple like booking a plane ticket. But in professions that require a high degree of knowledge, skill, or creativity, that doesn’t seem to be the case. For example…

TurboTax (DIY tax preparation software that many Americans use) came out in, wait for it, 1984, and the accounting profession seems to be holding up fine. QuickBooks? 1992. LegalZoom (a U.S. service that sells template legal documents for things like making a will, or selling your house): 2001. Various pieces of website creation software have been around since the early 2000s as well. Yet, bookkeepers, attorneys, and web designers haven’t been eliminated. There honestly isn’t enough money in the world to convince me to do my own taxes; the first business task I outsourced was accounting, and I’m never going back!

Likewise, many service providers do something that you could do yourself if you have the time and the desire. During COVID, I learned how to cut my own hair by watching YouTube videos. It actually looked OK (not just my opinion, validated by several friends!). But a few years ago, I went back to the salon; my hairdresser does a better job with less hassle. The same is true of tons of professional services: we’re hired to do things that people are not incapable of doing themselves, they just don’t want to or don’t have time.

Then there’s translation quality

This newsletter doesn’t have enough room to dissect the issue of AI-generated translation quality. But let’s say this, because it’s what I tell my clients.

• DIY can be a decent option for a low-stakes, information-only document that will be used only in-house (“Kind of/sort of what does this say in our language”).
• AI often sounds great, when it’s totally incorrect, and it does crazy stuff. A client came to me because they suspected that a translator had used machine translation. The clue? The name of the Swiss town “Aubonne” had been “translated” as “Augood.” No kidding.
• Raw AI output is a wildly bad idea for anything that carries a legal, reputation, or brand risk, or where consistent terminology is important. A lot of my clients use AI-generated translations of conference presentations. You’ll see things like the English word “capital” (in the financial sense) translated in three different ways, in the same paragraph. AI gleefully spits out, “capitaux propres,” “fonds propres” and “capital,” or it will use the same French word for two different concepts in English (“financement” for both “financing” and “funding,” for example). I’m sure other languages have these examples as well, and it’s not what you want in your annual report.

Many freelancers’ issue? Selling the wrong thing

In my opinion, many freelancers have a deeper issue, which is that they’re selling the wrong thing. Recently, someone commented on a LinkedIn post I wrote (I’m paraphrasing here), “So many translators go on and on about how complicated and difficult the work is, when they should really be emphasizing how much easier the client’s life will be when they don’t have to deal with translation anymore.”

Bingo. Clients want a solid translation. You can’t be a nice person and an incompetent translator and expect to retain high-paying clients. But you can and should realize that most clients hire you to solve a problem and take something off their to-do list. You want to emphasize:

• Peace of mind: Once the client hires you, they no longer have to worry about their translations
• Risk reduction: No more wondering what’s in that AI-generated translation
• Trust and confidentiality: Their document won’t be blasted out in a “come and get it” e-mail to 50 translators
• Confidence and reputation: The documents you translate can stand up to legal, reputation, and brand risks; AI can’t stand behind what it produced, because it’s not human

Also: Getting clients out of the AI slop

In recent months, I’ve also landed some new writing clients who hired me specifically to get them out of the AI slop. Ghostwriting for the CEO; writing the company newsletter; doing case studies and client interviews.

I’m a little skeptical of claims/hopes that the pendulum is swinging away from AI. I think that there are just too many clients who prioritize price and speed over trust and quality. But I do think that there are many, many clients who have certain tasks for which they will not use AI, and they’re willing to pay quite well for an explicitly human touch.

I hope these tips are helpful!