Daniel Nackovski: Expanding Global Sales

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>> Sunny Gault: Hi! Welcome to Dog & Pony. I'm Sunny Gault. So your company has decided to expand its reach to other countries. You have tons of material needing to be translated, so what do you do? Daniel Nackovski is the President of Across Systems, a company who claims to have a simple solution. Tell me about Across Systems. What does your company do?

>> Daniel Nackovski: We develop something that's called translation management systems. And this is basically a corporate platform to manage your linguistic assets. And at the end of the day, this is a platform that will help you as an organization drive sales abroad and penetrate new markets.

>> Sunny Gault: Daniel, how does the company started?

>> Daniel Nackovski: A company that all of you might be familiar with, Nero, they're famous for their software, Nero Burning. Now when they decided to sell the products outside of Germany, they faced some issues with the translations. So what they did that they dedicated 3 or 4 internal developers to develop some kind of application that would help them sell their products across the globe and this internal project was named Across.

>> Sunny Gault: What does this process like? Is it a simple process? Is it a difficult process? They get the software, is it literally plugging something in and then suddenly everything's translated? Is it that easy?

>> Daniel Nackovski: It's actually pretty simple. Let me give you an example here. Imagine that I as an organization. I sell cellphones. To better be able to sell this cellphone all over the world, I need to translate all of this information, all the documentation. So the first time, what I do is that I take the English content and translate that in Across and then there is something called a translation memory within the system that remembers this. Now imagine that six months later, there is a new release of this product, of this thought. So what I do now is that I update my English content because there are some new features in this phone and I run this up-to-date documentation in the system again and what the system now does is that it kicks in and basically translate all the identical text again. And I only, as an organization, have to pay and spend time on the new text, so to say, to translate that.

>> Sunny Gault: Do the translators have to know a lot about your software in order to work with it?

>> Daniel Nackovski: It's -- it's like any other software. There is some ramped up time where you have to get used to this software but it's also something that the translators appreciate because they can translate more words with the software than what they could before the software.

>> Sunny Gault: So you're the President of Across Systems. What does that mean and what do you do?

>> Daniel Nackovski: Basically, what I do here in the US is that -- that I run the US unit of Across Systems. So what I do is that I try to talk to CEOs, sales directors, marketing directors and educate them on the importance of language as a strategic point in global sales. Sales is always done locally and if you want clients to buy your products, it's more likely that they will do so if the communication is in their native language, if it's error free, and if it's of course, consistent.

>> Sunny Gault: What are your concerns? What keeps you up at night?

>> Daniel Nackovski: How to educate the American clients on the strategic importance of language. Now, if we look at the European market, the companies in Europe are familiar with this issue for the simple reason of the small domestic markets they have. As a European company, you are basically forced to sell your products in other countries. Now in US, the domestic market has been a very big, big market. But nowadays, as we see, the economy's changing and we need to help American companies sell their products abroad.

>> Sunny Gault: Daniel, what is your favorite thing about working on this industry?

>> Daniel Nackovski: Well, my favorite thing is that I -- I feel that I help companies to be more successful, that I'm directly involved in a company's global sales even if I'm not employed by that company.

>> Sunny Gault: Daniel, thanks for joining us today.

>> Daniel Nackovski: Thanks for having me.

>> Sunny Gault: And as always, if you have questions, comments or ideas for guests, please email info@dogandpony.com. I'll Sunny Gault. Thanks for watching.

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