International prospection: Which language to choose?
TheFamily is an accelerator initially devoted to the French startup ecosystem. Its reputation with French entrepreneurs expanded since 2013 in particular thanks to its YouTube channel, Startupfood, which has today more than 35,000 followers. In 2016, in the context of its strategy for internationalisation, TheFamily chose to shift most of its content production into English. Which language strategy do we have to undertake for a company which wants to internationalize itself? Is English language the good solution to communicate abroad?
To work with Chinese merchants in Paris, it is essential to speak Wenzhou or Cantonese.
Several years ago, Stéphane, a certified public accountant from Levallois asked me to help him in his prospection with Chinese merchants of Paris. In Paris, there are two main diasporas of French-Chinese merchants. They both speak two different languages:
- Wenzhou which is spoken by the Chinese diaspora from the city of Wenzhou, China.
- Cantonese, which is spoken by the Chinese diaspora from the southeast of Asia.
Thus, I advised Stéphane to recruit in his team one person who originates in one of the two diasporas so that the firm can ensure a service of accounting in Wenzhou or Cantonese.
This strategy helped him to win every month one new French-Chinese customer. The language has been the determining factor, not French language, not English, not Mandarin but Wenzhou and Cantonese.
Communicating in the native language of the prospects.
The story of Stéphane shows that communicating in the native language of the prospects is an advantage in prospection. The ideal to reach it, is to gather teams of collaborators of the targeted different communities in prospection. A Parisian accounting firm will then be able to work with the whole world tomorrow, without leaving Paris, by selecting collaborators originating from different diasporas.
English is what Latin was at Renaissance… It enables a cross-border communication, but communicating in the native language of the other is a major asset to start.
B2B: Prospecting internationally in a ’fractal’ world.
Like Bruno Marion says (look at the video above), some characteristics of our world became fractal.
A fractal object faithfully replicate itself no matter what the level of observation, as this figure shows.
On a global scale, the world is composed of different language communities. On the scale of international metropolises, we then find numerous language communities that can be observed on an individual family level data. Language communities become fractal and are not necessarily tied to strict geographical zone like before.
In Paris, London or New York, we speak Chinese, French, English, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic,…We must not consider languages according to geographies but according to communities of persons that are often living together in the same international city.
Targeting its prospection to be efficient and choosing its language according to the target.
To sum up, if a French company wants to work in the USA and one of its collaborators is Polish… Maybe it will need to work in Polish to target its first prospects among the 10 million Polish-Americans. It would certainly be more efficient to start.
solving interpreting problems for you
7 年@Pascal very interesting thought about conquering from Paris now what would happen if you choose to explain your global business strategy to experts such as, let's say #translators ?? ?