10 Key Takeaways From GALA Amsterdam 2017

I am honored to attend GALA conference in Amsterdam 26-29 March 2017, The program was full of interesting sessions and workshops ranging from marketing & sales strategies, executive leadership and operations, translation technology, interpreting. It was a great opportunity to network and meet up with the industry colleagues. Everything was perfect, the experience was definitely very positive. So I’d love to share with you my insights from Gala Amsterdam 2017

1- Good Preparation, Good Event

Preparing the event is your pass ticket to a successful event, checking the web portal for the event, studying the profile of attendees and their interests and backgrounds, will help you shortlist who you want to meet and what topics you want to discuss.

2- Pitch by Not Pitching

People attending events have a major fear of being surrounded by sales representatives, everyone is claiming they have the best service and offer, you need to cool down and enjoy your time and have an introductory email with the suspects or prospects to see if they wish to have an offer proposition conversation or not, otherwise don’t initially promote your services, wait and when they ask you what you do, you can then unleash the beast.

3- Follow up is your Make it or Break it!

We all return from the event with lots of positive vibes, many interested people and multiple opportunities in the horizon, timely and tailored follow up is essential to either take this interest to the next level and land a new customer or simply lose it all.

4- Catching up with Competitors … Not bad

In This Episode of GALA we had multiple discussions with Fellow Arabic LSP’s and it was very useful and insightful, openness with competitors on shared challenges can actually come up with good solutions and practices that will solve your own problems and will have positive impact on the market you are serving.

5-Using the Social Media is the real deal

In the past attending event was a one man show, when I attend I can only see and affect those who see me, I am missing so many things going around and many attendees are not even aware of my existence let alone what I am saying or sharing.

This year the live coverage of the event created a wider coverage of Future Trans presence and contribution and increased the return from the event.

6- SCRUM, AGILE, Large Projects in Tight deadlines

This was loud talk during the conference, people are discussing the management of localization process in SCRUM and Agile frameworks, projects are becoming either continuous agile drops or Large and compressed deadlines and LSP who have the capacity and scalability and technology support will survive this wave.

7- Quality …. Like Religion and Sex

One of the most important take away from the last session about laws of Sales in localization by: Renato Benenato (EX Vice President of new business development and marketing communication in Moravia) was saying that ”Quality is given it shouldn’t be part of your sales proposition, it is like Religion and sex no one should talk about them, with the pressure of CL projects and large volumes in yesterday deadlines, a solid quality process and framework needs to be inbuilt in your localization process .”

8- The Future of the Industry … Threats ahead

Discussions and Knowledge fest showed that Medium and Small size LSP still discuss topics and face challenges that are obsolete, these are important topics but should have been settled long time ago to be prepared for the future, but unfortunately this is not the case, talks about sales and operation, compensation and benefits, applying technology still is a hot topic on the tables of GALA while the Keynote session suggested a different future that we might not be prepared to handle.

9- New Ideas for Differentiation

One of the interesting sessions was the one discussing differentiation by Publication of good content, this is a new method of saying we are different from everyone claiming he is an expert, publishing valuable articles in Vertical periodicals and magazines gave this LSP a competitive advantage that is hardly beaten by: David Utrilla from U.S. Translation Company.

10- Don’t work during the Event, you are at work already!!

Try to shut down your laptop and don’t frequently check your email, enjoy the time, network and socialize with people you don’t get to see every day and don’t worry will be soon back to your laptop and your emails.

People love those who show genuine interest in their conversation and discussion not those who are distracted by looking into the screen.

Please feel free to contact me at m.karim(@)future-trans.com and I will be more than happy to discuss any part from the above. Also If someone took notes during the event and would like to share it with me, I’d appreciate this.

Looking forward to see you again in Gala Boston 2018 🙂