Multilingual Sales Support

Big news: Radiant has expanded to Italy and France to help Danish companies in these markets🌍 And I know what's at stake. The first time we entered Germany, we skipped our 7 steps. We failed and had to shut down. A year later, we tried again - this time following all 7 steps. Now Germany is our fastest growing market. For Italy and France, we're applying the same 7 steps: 1. Analyze: Focus on Ideal Customer Profiles and how they buy and engage with competitors. Most importantly, we've listed to learnings from people already doing sales in Italy and France. 2. Plan: Business case with conservative ROI, full risk assessment, and a sales playbook adjusted to cultural communicatio. We also set first references and niche campaigns. 3. Test top funnel: 2.819 calls -> 748 connected -> 106 booked sales meetings. And alot of feedback about prospects problems and needs. 4. Recruit: Christoffer Tofte built a strong team of native-speaking salespeople (pictured below) all with Danish experience. Each market has two dedicated reps led by a senior profile, plus one multilingual bridging cultures. Centrally supported with 3.500 hours of Sales Enablement. 5. Onboard: A 90-day journey - Week 1 adoption, Week 2-3 practicing daily funnel, Week 4-8 refining outbound relevance, Week 9-12 pipeline ownership. Our expectations: be 'umage', be curious, be failing, and be invested in colleagues and client. 6. Test conversion: Conducting sales meetings to build trust, reduce risk, and show positive change. This is where the most valuable insights come from to drive sharper qualification, smoother processes, and more relevant value proposition. 7. Scale: Not yet - first we must practice 3 and 6 to prove ROI by August 2026. ⚖️The stakes: ❌Failure costs ~5M DKK and maybe my CEO title. ✅Success means a proven path for Danish B2B companies into France & Italy. Either way, this expansion is like sales: win or lose. For better or worse, I'm used to it😉 #Entrepreneurship #Sales #Leadership

For years, I thought the French sales market was mainly France. That made sense when I was an AE. Most of my focus was on French companies, French buyers and French hiring profiles. But as I moved into sales leadership and started managing the French market more broadly, the picture changed. French-speaking sales talent is everywhere. Some of the strongest reps are based in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Quebec. Others sit in multilingual hubs like Barcelona, Lisbon, Dublin, Athens, Malta or Bucharest. Then there are major nearshore markets such as Casablanca and Mauritius, where French-language commercial teams operate at scale. The market is much bigger than nationality. It is about language, culture, buyer understanding and where companies have built effective sales operations. That also changes how you hire. A strong French-speaking SDR or AE does not need to sit in Paris to understand the market. They need to know how French buyers think, how decisions are made, how trust is built and how to communicate with the right level of directness, credibility and nuance. Having worked as an AE and now as a Senior Sales Manager for the French market, I have seen both sides. As an individual contributor, location often looked like a constraint. As a manager, it looks more like a sourcing strategy. The real question is not: “Where can I find French salespeople?” It is: “Where are the strongest French-speaking sales ecosystems, and which one fits the role I am hiring for?” That is what this map is about. #SalesLeadership #FrenchMarket #SalesRecruitment #MultilingualSales #SDR #AE #GTM #Hiring

Selling is hard when you don’t speak the language of your customer. I don’t mean this figuratively—I literally do not speak Spanish, which is the primary language of our provider base. Founder-led sales is always a challenge, but I’ve found it especially daunting given my inability to speak the native language of the people we aim to serve. A process that typically relies on nuance, clarity, and even playfulness is, for me, constrained by my limited ability to connect through language. In the early days of heva, I leaned heavily on our Co-founder and CTO, Hector Terrero, to help drive sales. That’s not a typical CTO responsibility, but with his roots and fluency in Dominican Spanish, he bridged gaps I simply could not. We often invited provider prospects to Google Meet so I could use live translation, and I relied on ChatGPT—tuned to Dominican Spanish—to help adapt my WhatsApp outreach for our audience. I quickly realized that while I was not able to do this specific task on my own, as a team we had the combined skills to get the job done. We moved forward by hiring Account Executives with local cultural and language expertise, and have now successfully built a sales team across the Dominican Republic and Mexico that is embedded with our providers and their patients. While I lacked the skills to directly execute all our sales, I was able to appreciate the right process, lean on a dynamic and capable co-founder, and bring on the right talent for long-term execution. What seemed like a fundamental barrier to my ability to serve as a CEO is now surmountable—thanks to a wonderful team. We’re still learning, and I’m personally working on my Spanish every week, but I’m glad we have found a way to make the process work. I’d love to hear from others: What tips do you have for working—and especially selling—in a market where you don’t speak the language or share the local culture?

A growing trend in the local GTM? Hiring bilingual AEs. We are noticing a few companies hiring bilingual field AEs in territories with high concentrations of Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese populations - so we mapped it against our dataset and 3rd party census data to try and understand this strategy further: The clear variable these teams are trying to influence is win rate. Software is a complex sale. Explaining value, understanding pain points, and gaining trust are the unskippable stepping stones to closing a deal. Makes sense why you would want your sales team to match the language of the customer base that you are trying to sell into. It's significantly harder to check all those boxes when you *literally do not speak the same language. We checked the cities of bilingual job postings against US Census table B16001 "Language spoken at home?" to see if our hunch was correct: Spanish-bilingual postings for Edinburgh Texas map to an 88% Hispanic population. Mandarin-bilingual postings for San Diego map to a 12.14% Asian population (double the national average). Any team can identify clusters for their field sales teams where they should consider hiring bilingual AEs with census data, but operationalizing the strategy also requires great account selection support and a clean data foundation. The most important piece here is a complete view of your TAM in every strategic market, categorized by language so you know which accounts these specialized AEs should be working. These AEs are a valuable, constrained resource, and they shouldn't be wasting time on accounts another AE can close at a normal win rate. You need to be able to see all 5,000 accounts in a city, then break out the accounts that should be routed to a bilingual AE to prioritize. Also interesting - this is not a field sales only trend. We're also seeing inbound closing roles crop up with explicit requests for *written fluency. There's likely a motion here where teams are also routing inbound marketing leads to specialized-language reps (and the contracts + sales materials are also written in the same language). There's so much you can learn from the sharpest GTM orgs by studying the public fingerprints of their strategy - we're going to keep digging for more of these, follow if you don't want to miss the next one!