Speak Your Customer's Language
If you want to have a desired impact on the customer, you have to speak their language. Today that’s important than ever before as customers are speaking inside of chat groups, video conferences and even Tik Tok.
Years back I had what was my very first big keynote, it would be an audience of 500 people for Mitsubishi in Tokyo, Japan. I was terrified… so I set about preparing meticulously. I finessed every slide, planned every sentence even practiced detailed body language.
Soon enough the day came and as I stepped on stage I found myself looking out over sea of Japanese men (they were all men, except for maybe one or two), all in what looked like the same grey suit, white shirt and red tie. What’s more is that they were all smoking, which made the back of the conference space just fade out like looking into a foggy day.
For anyone that’s done work internationally you know there are two kinds of translation. There’s consecutive translation, where you speak a few lines and then take turns with the translator translating what was said. And there’s simultaneous translation, an incredible feat of human ability where a translator translates near real time simultaneously listening to what you’re saying and translating it as the same time. Fortunately, this was the former so I had a chance to remember what I was going to say next between translations.
Well I got out my first line and the translator started right on queue. It’s going perfectly. But then all of a sudden the translator seems to be going an inordinate amount of time, 30 seconds have already gone by. 60 seconds. 90 seconds. A full two minutes later he’s finally wrapping up and the entire audience, all 500 people, erupt in laughter. I didn’t tell a joke!
So I stumble through the rest of the keynote and I find the translator as soon as I can backstage. I say, “Mr. Numata” (that was his name, Mr. Numata), what did you say out there? Why was everyone laughing?” “Ahh” he says “I told them you were here to talk about innovation, but you were really here to find a Japanese wife”.
I still don’t think I’ve fully recovered from that moment. Nor have I met my wife, Japanese or otherwise. But I learned something: if your customers are conversant on Tik Tok, WeChat, Facebook messenger or any other platform, it becomes necessary to learn that language to speak to them there. If you want to have a desired impact on the customer, you have to speak their language.