By Manpreet Singh
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more diverse office than ours. Like the country in which we’ve built our business, TalkLocal is a melting pot of different cultures, races and languages, which we have occasionally leveraged. A sales staff that isn’t constrained to English has great potential to widen your customer base, but multilingual business has its own nuances. I asked some of our team members what makes it special.
Silvia D’Archivio (Italian): Having shared business etiquette and no language barrier helps. However, my culture tends to distrust salespeople, so you must be especially able to convince customers that your product is of high quality and is practical for them.
Amandeep Bakshi (Punjabi): Conversations with native speakers can be friendlier and require a less aggressive sales approach. Explain in the layman’s terms of your language how your product works and its benefits to the customer.
Julio Jimenez (Spanish): Speaking native Spanish in the U.S. has an intimacy to it. This can make building rapport with a customer easier, but makes it more important not to seem like a salesman or they may feel manipulated.
The common theme is clear: a multilingual sales staff can be much more familiar with customers who speak their language, and this can accelerate closings. However, staff should be careful not to abuse their common-language trustworthiness.
TalkLocal wouldn’t be what it is today without a confluence of people from different backgrounds bringing new ideas. This is the nature of the globalized society we live in – your business would do well to speak its languages.
