Does localization strategy follow the business – or does the business follow the localization strategy?

Taken from an interview and Q&A with Michael Buckham-White of Premiere Global at one of SDLs recent localization best-practice events.

Is it generally better for the business to drive localization strategy or do you find the business.

Good question… so I will come at this from my perspective, from my experiences. My background is in web, specifically in building interactive marketing strategies, but I think the lessons I have learned have application outside interactive marketing. Premiere Global Services is a global provider of on-demand applied communications technologies. Our global headquarters is in Atlanta and we have a presence in 24 countries.

But before we start, let’s be real about some things. The decision of whether localize first or create a global sales strategy is made somewhere above our pay grade and most of us are not in a position to fundamentally effect the company we work for. Our job is to take that corporate strategy and create a strategy for global markets that best supports the company’s goals. That means each of us need to understand what those goals are so we can best advise the “higher pay grades”.

We don’t get to make decisions on corporate strategy, but we do get to support that strategy.

So given that, let’s take a step back and look at the options. If you have feet on the street outside your domestic market, you have no choice but to enable those guys. If your target is to globalize because you feel that you need to compete ‘out there’, be very cautious in the way you (localization managers) build your localization strategy. It has to be extremely fluid – localization is a very expensive proposition so if you don’t have channels in-country, you have to ask if localizing right now is the right thing to do.

Given that this forum is for localization best-practices let’s assume our “higher pay grades” have a corporate strategy that leads to a localization strategy. The first rule is “don’t half-step”. So many managers with responsibility for localization figure they can go into this slowly, waiting for the global strategy to show results before implementing a local-language strategy – but you have to make the strategic decision to support language alongside the corporate decision to do business somewhere. At the end of the day, when that key sale is made you have to be ready to support it.

“Boots on the ground”

For us at Premiere Global the situation is that over the last 20 years we have grown dramatically through acquisition, both of domestic US companies and also in EMEA and Asia-Pac. So it reached a critical mass for us, and we realized that we needed to synchronize about how we present our brand to the marketplace. Which all sounds great…

… but what we found by the time we reached that conclusion was that the boots that were already on the ground – the business development, sales and marketing teams in each region and country – had been doing whatever they had to do to create the materials they need…. and now we had a mess on our hands. Four or five different websites all managed by in-country individuals, four or five versions of each product manuals and sales collateral with no consistency of style and varying levels of accuracy.

For a global company this isn’t acceptable and so my advice is that once boots on the ground and a presence outside the US you must support that team as well as you support your domestic teams. That doesn’t necessarily mean translating everything but it does mean being ‘real’ about the commitment to local markets and trade-offs you will undoubtedly experience if you half-step market-preparation.

Lessons learned

So ultimately we decided that a key part of global expansion is in understanding exactly how we will support our people in-country. That strategy means knowing how we will support them getting the materials they need to be able to market, to sell and to support. This helps the company be smart when making choices about where to invest time and effort.

Editors note: Michael has kindly agreed to answer any questions and repond to comments when they are posted.