Fruit Labellers Develop Total Solution
Sinclair International is the market leader in automatic high-speed fruit labelling systems. The company specialises in the labelling of loose fruit for sale in supermarkets, enabling retailers to correctly price loose fruit by easily identifying the variety and Price Look Up number at the checkout. Although the company operates worldwide, its major markets are Western Europe, the USA, South America, South Africa, Australasia and Thailand. Sinclair employs 220 staff worldwide, 120 of whom are based in Norwich, and already has a turnover in excess of £40 million.
Tim Watkins, Marketing Manager for Europe and the Mediterranean, points out that 95% of Sinclair's business is outside the UK, and UK-based staff deal mainly with the rest of Europe. The French, Spanish and Italian languages are extremely important when dealing with customers and agents in the European fruit industry. Company practice is that front-line sales staff are employed with fluency in a minimum of one foreign language, and they are encouraged to develop fluency in a second or third foreign language where possible.
Promotional material is designed in-house and translated into French, Spanish, Italian and German using an external agency. The company now plans to translate its website into Spanish, an important international language, followed by French and Italian.
Says Tim, foreign languages are used mostly in the general sales process. Although most of our agents have some staff who speak English, in general, they feel more secure communicating in their own language. Cultural barriers can also slow you down where you would otherwise do business more quickly. It's all about gaining more business. In Spain, for example, personal relationships are still very important and initially we found it difficult to penetrate this market.
In 1998 it was decided that I would move temporarily to our subsidiary in Spain to perfect my Spanish and get closer to the market and our potential customers. I spent considerable time visiting key potential packers with our local staff building up confidence and establishing a rapport with the decision makers. This approach really paid off and we were able to secure additional business on the back of our improving customer relationships. You could say that we built a cultural bridge that brought us much closer to our Spanish customers.
www.sinclair-intl.com