Client Acquisition and Relationship Management

No, not that kind of relationship. I am talking about keeping track of clients and potential clients, not managing my personal life. Back in the Fall I bought Sage ACT! to track potential clients and my interactions with them. While there are plug-ins for the software to interact with other standard applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, I have a number of problems with my version of ACT!. For one thing, the supposed integration with Outlook doesn't work very well and doesn't recognize e-mails sent by other people within the same organization, unless I set each person up as a separate contact. That's quite a task for larger language service providers with many different project managers.

Besides, I have moved away from Outlook and now mostly use Gmail to manage my e-mail. The e-mail address connected to my website domain name forwards to a Gmail account that I can easily access from my phone or any browser. That greatly simplifies negotiating projects when I'm not sitting at my computer - for example while having my morning coffee (at which point it's already early afternoon in Europe).

I am therefore looking again for another customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Samantha Gluck mentioned on Twitter a blog post with a list of some 20 CRM solutions for freelancers, with a brief blurb and links to all of them. This yielded a couple of promising options: Work[etc] and Insight.ly. The first one is expensive (at least for a one-person company), but includes a billing solution. The second one has a free version, but no billing module and seems less customizable than Work[etc].

Unfortunately both of them are cloud-based (i.e., hosted on someone else's server). I suppose this is necessary if I want to be able to access this information on the go, for example at a conference, but I'm not sure how I feel about entrusting my client contact information to "the cloud". On the other hand, my gmail contacts are already on Google's servers and all my e-mails are stored on my web hosting company's and/or Google's computers. So this may not make much of a difference.

About client acquisition: a few posts ago, I wrote about creating a second, more client-focused blog and alternating posts between this blog and the other one. In preparation I started to re-write some of the older posts from this blog that might be interesting to potential clients. But while uploading a new photo of myself (courtesy of my daughter and son-in-law who took and cropped/processed the photo, respectively) I realized that most social media sites only let you list one blog URL. So now I am rethinking the entire two-blog concept. Back to the drawing board, then ... (By the way, the new picture is in the bio section to the right of this post.)

Note: I will be at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Chicago next week and may not post next Wednesday, unless I have enough time (and an internet connection) at O'Hare before my flight back.

A Translation Bloggers Community

During my further reading on marketing strategies I came across the advice to create a two-tiered website: one section would be aimed at potential clients, the other would be for peers.That seems to me makes a lot of sense. On the one hand, we want to attract potential clients, on the other hand, we are also looking for referrals from other translators. Besides, working by ourselves in our home offices, we need the cross-fertilization that comes with talking to others in the same profession.

This blog is already mostly about working as a translator and seems to be mostly read by others in the profession, or entering the field. So it will become the "peer section" of my website. To that end, I've added on the right-hand side a list of links to other translators' blogs and compilations of blogs. My website, then, while retaining a link to this blog (and vice versa) will become even more of a(n attempted) client-acquisition vehicle.

There are, of course, any number of translators' blogs out there. The American Translators' Association lists some of these in its "Blog Trekker" section, but that is only a small number of the available blogs. To turn all of these individual blogs into a conversation we need a common platform on which to exchange our ideas. Sure, we can read and comment on some of the posts, maybe subscribe to several better-known blogs, but none of us has the time to read everything that's being posted by colleagues.

I'm not talking about Watercooler or some of the other fee-based groups that exist. I also don't think creating yet another proprietary platform would be helpful. Instead, we need to find a way to connect all our existing blogs into some sort of network-- preferably one that can be searched by topic, in combination with posting language(s). So, if I'm interested in how other translators have handled non-payment issues from agencies in Eastern Europe, for example, I can check one location rather than having to search various forums and blogs. Since by definition we all speak more than one language -- but none of us speak all the languages in which such information may be available -- it would be helpful if such a search could then be limited to certain languages.

Is this a pipe dream? Would it be helpful? Could it be done? What do you think?

Maybe this is not feasible.