awkward silence

Welcome to my blog post; please enter and have a sit at the discussion table. I'm going to tell you that the way we behave during discussions seems to be terribly impolite no matter what we do, and then I'm going to ask you not to say anything for the next thirty seconds. 

Can you handle awkward silence in a business meeting?

translation, let's not get lost in it

Google Chrome translate feature 

I totally have to praise Google Chrome and the huge progress they brought in overpassing language barriers.

I can't really imagine how things were done prior to this translation feature embedded in Chrome browser; much more expensively, I imagine.

On my side, I like to investigate on my own before committing resources to ordering a study. I couldn't really justify paying study after study just to tell my stakeholders: look, it's not worth pursuing this or that market. I could argue the savings done by not going into the wrong directions, but I actually prefer to pay for documented opinion to confirm my hunch that there's potential in a certain market.

yes, outsource

By all means, outsource. I did.
But choose the right provider. I didn't.

This is a short, measurable story about call centers. One of my most solid presumptions was shattered: that English will take you anywhere.

When planning campaigns / events abroad and approaching companies, you might have the illusion that English works everywhere. It doesn't. You might even think that, if you're calling medium & large companies,  English is sufficient.

But if you imagine this will not affect your success rate, you are wrong.

I've measured the difference.

I've worked with an English-speaking call center for a project addressing companies in a German-speaking country, calling multinationals. In the database qualification phase, their success rate was 35%.  Most of the rejections sounded like:
- we're not interested
- we can't provide any information over the phone
- we don't speak English
- they hung up / transfer failed.

Taking the same project to a native call center made the difference. 96% completion rate. Where the companies were previously rejecting any form of collaboration, now they provided the requested data.

So there you have my conclusion, in measurable form: use native speakers when cold calling the companies.

clearly misunderstood, or who speaks what

Two non-native English speakers can make a conversation quite funny. I should know, I'm one of them.

I recently had a very loud conversation over the phone with someone from a neighboring country. This person was trying to compensate the terrible English with voice volume to improve my understanding.

This reminded me how confusing it gets sometimes when you have two people from different non-English speaking country trying to understand each other. Not to mention having such attempts over the phone.