Speaker 1: Hello and welcome back to the Freelance Verse. Thanks for coming back or thanks for still being here. I'm back from my trip to Argentina. It's good to be back. Good to go back into the routine. The trip has been amazing. Such a vast and beautiful country, really the nature, the people, the food, the music, the whole atmosphere. It was absolutely fantastic. We had a great time. This week I've been struggling a bit to get back into the routine with the jetlag etc. So this is quite a short, not a short, but a last minute video. I get asked all the time, literally almost every week, how to find direct clients for translation. So first of all, I feel like everyone and their grandma tells you in this sector that you need to find direct clients to succeed, to work sustainably as a translator. I am not one of these persons. I told you many times on the channel, I don't subscribe to this mantra. I feel like it's overhyped. Of course, direct clients are great. They are important to find, but you can perfectly fine translate with agencies and be sustainable and make a good living. Nevertheless, today's video is about direct clients. So what are they? They are basically business relations in which you cut out the middleman. So you don't have an agency or a comms company or a supply chain manager, whatever would be in between. You don't have that. You work directly with the company that uses your text in the end, right? This has many benefits. Number one being you can charge more because no middleman is taking out the cut. You make actual business connections in your area of specialization that can be very good for referrals afterwards. You can really establish yourself as the language expert, right? You are the person doing the text for this end company. So they wouldn't think, oh, you know, this and this agency did this for me. They would actually think of you as your name as the language expert. But as good as all these things are, it also has drawbacks, right? You are responsible and you're liable if you work with companies directly. You don't have the buffer of the agency that takes all the negative feedback first. You know, that's a big deal actually. Obviously you have a lot of negotiating, finding clients, doing all the terms and services. You have much more non-paid work when you try to find direct clients than with agencies. With agencies, you can maximize your paid work. So it's more like, yeah, you're much more productive, I feel like. And so even though your rates might be a bit lower with agencies, you're much more productive. So you can actually make that up if not overtake it even. Now I should mention at this point, before we get into how to find them, finding direct clients is the real stuff, right? This is not for people that want to do just a bit of translation on the side. I know I have a lot of viewers like this and it's perfectly fine. I'm not saying it's not possible. You can do that. But then you should probably stick with agencies, right? Because finding direct clients, it's another beast, right? You're not simply a translator anymore. You are now a business developer, you are a salesperson, you're a purchasing manager all at once, okay? So are you ready for that? Then we get into it. All right, before you actually get out there and just send emails or call random companies, you need to do some market research. You need to figure out who is your perfect client. You need to really define that, okay? So grab a piece of paper, sit down and think very thoroughly who is your ideal client and be specific, right? Where are they located geographically? Where do you find them online? Where do they hang out? How many employees do they have? What sector are they in? What's the revenue they are making? Which departments do they have? So really be specific, go down the list of all the things I just mentioned and try to define your perfect ideal client. Once you have your client defined, you go into the research phase. And I feel like the research phase is the most important part and many people overlook this phase or don't even start doing it. They don't spend enough time on it. They just jump directly into prospecting now, which I wouldn't recommend. I would spend a lot of time researching. The more you spend on this part, the better will be your success rate later in prospecting. I can guarantee you that. It will still be low because success rate in prospecting is always low, but you can improve it significantly with a good research phase. So how can you find them? LinkedIn, Google, trade magazines, trade fairs, and networking events. These are the five solutions I will give you just right off the bat. Now, of course, you can't just go to a trade fair and with the expectation to go there and make sales and, you know, just create and find your perfect client. That's not how it works, right? If you go to a trade fair, do not go with the expectation of prospecting, with the expectation of finding a client, making a sale. Go with the expectation of making a connection. That is the goal you have there. You are still in the research phase when you're doing that, right? You go there with the goal to make a connection, to get a business card, to get a name, to get an email. So later after the event, you can actually reach out to this company with a reference to the person, with a reference to an interaction that will be worth much more than you can imagine. The key with direct clients is warm prospecting. With agencies, you can do cold prospecting. You might have a chance, but with direct clients, it's almost impossible. By the way, for those of you that don't know what that means, warm prospecting is basically warm calling. So when you already have a contact established, you already talked to someone there, you have a person, you have some kind of interaction. Cold calling refers to prospecting to a new client that you had no interaction before. So you just send an email to the info email and that's it. Warm has much more success rate than cold, but warm takes much more work than cold, right? So you can have a cold marketing campaign and just send out the same email to a thousand agencies. I mean, do that if you want to, right? You might have some success, but with warm, you need a much smaller pool, but much more work to get this pool, if you know what I mean. It's two different approaches. Both can work. I'm going to give you an example now. I'm just going to show you here on my screen. I haven't tested this, it's just an idea I had before, but I always like to do these in my videos to see, just to show you exactly how I would do this part, right? So let's imagine I am a Spanish to German translator in the tourism area, right? So I'm not personally a tourism specialist, I don't do tourism things, but what comes to mind immediately for me is hotels, right? That's probably one of the first things I would approach. I want to show you how I would do that with LinkedIn, Google, and also ChatGPT, because I try to incorporate into my daily workflow as much as possible, wherever possible, because it has so many applications. And I think it's still overlooked by many people. They say, oh, this is not for me, but I'm going to show you in a way how this could be useful in prospecting. So I said I would be a Spanish-German translator in the tourism sector. Now what I would probably look for is something like, what is the most popular, let's do holiday destination in Spain for German tourists. One of the most popular holiday destinations in Spain for German tourists is the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca, and Formentera. Mallorca in particular is a favorite destination among German tourists. Now I knew that because I'm very close to the Germans, but I don't know if you guys knew that. Now I have this information. I'm a German translator from Spanish and Mallorca is probably a very good place to go. Top hotels on Mallorca. I found a website here, the traveler website. What is it? Contenast Traveler. I don't know. I don't know this website, but it looks interesting and there are definitely hotels on here. One, two. Oh yeah, there are a lot. Okay. There are probably like 20 hotels on here. So that's already a great list, right? I can just go through these. Let's choose, I don't know. Let's go for this one. Belmond La Residencia in Della in Mallorca. I copy this name and I go to LinkedIn. LinkedIn, as I said, always your number one researching tool, right? Because you, oh, by the way, as you can see here, Edita's podcast, very good podcast. I was recently featured on it. This one is with Susie, also very good episode. If you want to watch mine, you can click up here or find it on Spotify. Amazing podcast. So I copied the name of the hotel and now I will go into the search function and just paste this in here and see what happens. And immediately the people come up, right? You see that it actually has a LinkedIn page, so that's definitely something to follow as well and to look it up how they, okay, they are actually writing in English. So it seems to be a, you know, an international hotel where people, oh, it looks beautiful. But anyways, what I would do is I would go to the people and then you get the list with 29 results of people actually working in this hotel, right? So you have Francesco, he's the concierge. You have Noemi, I don't know what she's doing, but Diogo is in the front office, for example. Javier as well. Vincente is in the restaurant. Amazing contacts. And I mean, especially these two front office people, I would immediately message them and be very informal. Just say, hey, look, I'm a German translator. I looked at your hotel. I'm actually specialized in hotel translations. I would go on their website. I don't know if they already have a German website, but probably not. So you could, you know, propose to them, like you obviously have very many German tourists. Why don't you have a website in German or marketing material? Could I talk to someone that could be interested in that? Do you know someone? Marketing, communication. They will probably tell you, right? And if not, you move on to the next hotel. You have a full list here. That is obviously very simplified. Not every sector is that straightforward. But this is just an example. And I wanted to show you a creative way on how to get down. Because you start with a funnel, you're a Spanish-German tourism translator. Then you go down a funnel, down a funnel, always until you find that last contact, that last email or LinkedIn or Instagram, whatever, where you can actually reach the right person. Hope this helps. So I'm back. The camera died, of course. I hope you could still see all of this, what I showed you. Everything is charged. Now, the problem with direct clients, where was I? So yeah, the problem with that is that for many clients, end clients, actually the localization translation process is kind of an afterthought, right? This is not really a relevant enough department or topic that there is actually departments in most of the companies. So it's really quite hard to find the right person to talk to. So if you do a process like this and you find people actually in the company, that's your best shot of finding the person responsible for localization. And then this person can or will, I don't say will most likely, but could potentially recommend you to and refer you to the person that is actually in charge. That can be a marketing person, a commerce person, a CEO, CFO sometimes. I had so many contacts of so many different people, even purchasing sometimes, you know, it really depends. You would not expect sometimes who is in charge of translation. But your best shot of getting to this person is by approaching someone within the organization. Once you have this contact, the end contact of the person, you can actually do warm prospecting, right? I made a video series, a two part series, you can click here if you're interested, where I looked for jobs live on camera until I found one. And there I give a lot of examples on how to actually write the emails to clients. Just in short summary here, make sure to address an actual person and not just your company, your team, your department, or just dear, never. Actually a real person, right? Address them, say how you found their contacts, through which person, reference and interaction before. So it actually becomes a warm email, not a cold email. Really focus on what you can do for the company, not what the company can do for you, right? You want to propose a service to them and don't immediately offer your translation services with prices, et cetera. It's not the same, right? You're not applying for a job there like you do at an agency. So you don't come with your CV attached, for example, not at all. You have to do a mentality shift. What you would attach in a direct customer's email is a flyer, for example, or your brochure, your leaflet. So these are all things you need to think of beforehand and make them. That's all the research phase as well, right? So don't talk to the client as the same as you would to a company, to an agency in terms of cut tools, in terms of TM, fuzzy matches, how much you charge per word, et cetera. That's not relevant to them, right? You are a service provider, you're a business and you're offering your services or you're inquiring if there is a need for your services. Make sure you include a call to action so they can actually contact you or check out your website, check out your LinkedIn. Make sure to have everything up to date and post it there in your signature preferably so they can easily check it and make sure for them to easily test your services as well, right? So if you offer a first order discount, a free trial, whatever, just make it as easy as possible for them to be interested and make the barrier of entry as low as possible for them. Of course, you need to keep track of all the prospecting you do. So have an Excel where you write down every one you reach out to and one week after reaching out to them, you should follow up because most likely you will not hear anything from people, right? So I think 80, 90% you will not hear anything. So it's important that you follow up once, I would say. I'm not a fan of people following up two, three, four times. It happens and it makes me a bit annoyed sometimes. So I follow up one week after I sent the initial email and then after one week, if I still haven't heard back, I delete it or I don't delete it, but I mark it as read as no response and maybe in a year or so I will reach out to them again. Now this one I described is really the active approach, let's call it that, right? The active approach. There is also a passive approach. That doesn't mean at all that it's less work, actually, it's probably more work in a way. It simply means that you don't actively go after clients. You don't actively search for them. The passive approach is the approach that I use as well. What it means is that you create a product, a content marketing, for example, in my case, videos and in other cases, blogs, LinkedIn website, go to conferences, do talks there, be very engaged in networking. What this then leads to is that you don't go after the companies, but the companies find you, right? That's the passive approach, passive in a way that it's not actively going after them, but it's still a lot of work, just not actively searching for them. It's completely up to you which one you go for. I like to go for the passive one because prospecting is not really my cup of tea. I don't like it that much. So I prefer making myself very visible so that people come to me. Another way you can stay visible in the industry is write to people, right? I probably write emails and messages to people every day, five times a day or something. Just write to interesting people that interest you in the industry, connect with them, schedule half an hour video chats to just have a little talk, an informal talk. That's what you would have in an office environment as well. We don't have that. So why not make it common for us to just have coffee breaks together, you know? Even if it's not a client, but I have several times a week, I have coffee breaks with my colleagues from all over the world. Every connection you make can down the line lead to a referral and to a potential job. There you go. Hope you enjoyed this video. Make sure to scroll down, like the video and subscribe to the channel for more content. Every Monday at 6 p.m. a new video. I see you with the next one. Bye bye.