Can a single start-up change the ways business translation is handled online? Administrative issues, gatekeepers, intricate frameworks, account management hassles, the necessity to manage multiple parties are all factors you need to be prepared for if you want to deal with enterprise clients. These issues were made even more complicated with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the pandemic also presented businesses the chance to use this situation for their benefit and profit from it by utilizing enhanced workflow solutions. The translation sector is notorious for having challenging business workflows as translation agencies often need to deal with clients from different segments.

Usually, the customer who needs business translation service does not have well-defined characteristics. The person demanding the translation services might be a marketing executive or a country manager, or a CEO assistant. It can even be localization directors who need translation services for fields outside their specialized areas. When the very definition of business translation includes organizations from various fields, how can a translation agency handle process to ensure a smooth workflow? The answer to that question comes from the CEO of the EMEA Region's leading online business translation agency Protranslate. "The essential factor to keep in mind is that you need to be able to capture the demand. For agencies that offer their services online, the strategy should be the exact opposite of the opposite of how a physical agency handles its sales.

Your online sales give enough info on your customer persona and how you need to handle that account. At that point, you should direct them with your workflow management framework to support that lead. In contrast to this approach, sales representatives in offline agencies usually have to devote days or even months to make it through gatekeepers, to understand if there is a necessity for the services rendered, to be assured that each person is informed about the solutions that could be offered, and eventually wait until the need occurs. What is worse is that it doesn't end there- the client has to remember that the solutions are available via the salesperson and get in touch with him later. How unproductive is that?" the CEO Kerem Kalkancı says. With the current technological improvements, translation and localization works can be handled at a fraction of the price of what it used to be around five years ago. These advances helped business translators offer their services at a large scale without many hiccups along the road. Thanks to computer-aided translation tools (CAT tools), improvements in translation memories, and machine translation technologies, translation agencies employ the "specialist translator in the loop" workflows to enhance their cost-effectiveness. That approach helps them speed up the process and produce top-quality translations with final proofreading and editing processes which are handled by professional humans.

These processes are handled effectively with cloud-based technologies. Sales, on the other hand, is the only part that is not handled online, and this needs to change," states Kalkancı. "Up until now, we as the co-founders were wondering if we were only capable of serving SMB segment businesses. But receiving orders from a bunch of Global 2000 clients on board with an "online-only" sales team, we were soon encouraged that we had 90% of the game plan in play. We are now improving our existing structure by adding the necessary key account management features to our workflows and with enterprise clients adjusting to new online approaches and knocking on our door, we are anticipating multiple digit growth in the upcoming years as well." Among the most influential organizations that have taken on the challenge of building a B2B sales organization from "online" space was SalesForce. As of now, it provides for both the enterprise and SMB segment clients with its SaaS CRM offerings. Using its local support agencies/partners in multiple countries for training and onboarding for its relatively complex network, it creates a good chunk of its leads online. It will be insightful to see how other B2B service providers get around the challenging enterprise business frameworks to find their unique way of capturing clients in a more online environment than ever before. With the worldwide event industry trying to find its way online, B2B establishments have struggled to offer their services to new possible clients through traditional marketing approaches. In saturated markets like translation and localization services, there is definitely a lot of opportunities to employ creative approaches, thanks to the continuously increasing phenomenon of globalization and the pandemic that pressured organizations to find their ways of serving online.