RLN

Handling Demanding Customers

Tekpro, the North Walsham manufacturers of food sampling equipment, understand the importance of knowing their customers’ language and understanding their culture. The company exports 66% of its turnover to 23 countries, primarily using distributors, and the company needs to ensure strict maintenance requirements, often at short notice, are maintained. Tekpro is market leader in the major grain producing countries in Europe, Asia & South America, manufacturing grain samplers, pellet testers, insectomats, hand spears & analytical equipment.

As is to be expected, communication with clients across the 23 countries varies, and distributors in many cases handle communications at local level. Nevertheless calls are often fielded directly - the company’s French contacts, for instance, are grateful for the facility to call Tekpro’s French-speaking staff directly. Contacts from Latin America also use a dedicated mobile number, and the Spanish distributor prefers a direct line to a Spanish speaker. Issues can sometimes occur, however, when these numbers are on divert to other staff who may receive calls from Spanish or Latin American contacts, which causes some communication difficulty. To overcome this, one of the company’s export staff is taking Spanish language training as part of the European-funded project Eurocom3.

Two staff from the export department have attended a workshop on Japanese business culture, where a number of useful tips were picked up such as how to gauge whether a meeting or presentation has gone well, how to help win over a potential Japanese client and best ways of following-up meetings held. The session ended in a one-hour basic Japanese language lesson on the basic pleasantries. "Learning all the things we should and shouldn’t do was useful, and gave us the opportunity to know the culture better to help prepare us for when we go over there."

Olivier Lyskawa of Tekpro’s technical sales team: "If we couldn’t speak French we would not be able to deal with our French distributor, as he doesn’t understand English. That’s a main advantage. For the payment terms I know what they are expecting. We sell industrial machines, and the electrical standards are different, so a knowledge of the technical culture is also important. Spanish, French and German are all spoken in the company. We have also worked in South America, so have gained Spanish skills there. When you can speak the language, you usually understand the culture quite well. A good understanding of the culture will very often give you the opportunity to sell more products than expected because you know what to do and what to say when needed what makes the customer feel that he is dealing with someone not so different from him.

From personal experience, it is much easier to do business with the Latin countries when you can speak the language than using English because they feel more confident when they talk to you and the conversation becomes more relaxed. Even if the customer has good English, he will always feel more comfortable in speaking his own command of language."

"What it is also important to know are that many Latin people are proud people and if they are customers even if they speak good English they consider that is a lack of respect to sell in their country without speaking their own language and without understanding their culture. Moreover, during a meeting, the Latin people like to talk to each other in their own language and what they say is very often important for the progress of the meeting and in understanding you will be able to prepare the right arguments to gear the discussion favourably for you and also to avoid being exploited, " says Olivier.

"We have translated the CS30 into French or Spanish, as it was necessary because as we have already noticed, most of the brochures send to a Latin country in English are going in the bin so were just wasting money. You cannot sell equipment such as ours for our industry into France without French brochures or into any Spanish speaking country without a brochure in Spanish".

As we all know English is a global business language, but speaking the language related to the market you wish to penetrate is a very strong argument!