Removing language barriers is key to building Latin American partnerships
Bengaluru to Buenos Aires by way of Berlin: Two Freshworks sales engineers team up to produce innovative partner training in Spanish
Earlier this year, Freshworks rolled out a global product demo readiness (PDR) program, offering Freshworks partners personalized, hands-on training in English.
However, for the Latin American market and its Spanish-speaking majority, Freshworks’ solution engineering team, led by Mukesh Mirchandani, quickly realized that enabling Latin American partners meant training them in their local language. (Spanish is most widely used in Latin America, but the most populous country, Brazil, uses Portuguese.)
The Latin American (LATAM) team—primarily English speakers—were on the lookout for a solution engineer who could help them translate English demos to Spanish when Karthik Singaraju, a Bengaluru-based lead solution engineer supporting Latin America, crossed virtual paths with Alberto Mercado, a Spanish-speaking solution engineer based in Germany.
“Thanks to Mercado, the Spanish session had more attendees than the ones in English!” says Singaraju.
Celebrating on Freshworks’ internal “shoutouts” channel, Mirchandani remarked, “Thank you, Alberto Mercado and the LATAM SE team, for displaying amazing craftsmanship, teamwork, and collaboration across geographies!” (Craftsmanship is part of CHAT, the Freshworks culture code.)
Internal partnerships foster stronger culture
Latin America presents challenges for sales and marketing teams. With differing economic models, governmental regulations, and cultures, language is the thread binding LATAM.
Speaking the language, says Mirchandani, “fosters a stronger partnership culture and lays the groundwork for growth by ensuring our non-English-speaking partners receive the same level of support as English-speaking ones.”
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While other companies may focus on high-revenue partners, Freshworks started the PDR program to extend support to smaller partners who sometimes lacked bilingual capabilities, making it difficult to grasp and convey product updates. Singaraju underscores the challenge: "While partner organizations' CEOs and leadership teams were proficient in English, the teams conducting customer demos struggled.”
Despite the 4.5-hour time difference , the team found an innovative way to coordinate efforts. Singaraju (in India) would start working on the English sessions early in his day so that he could discuss his progress with Mercado (in Berlin) around 6 p.m. before Mercado started working on the translations. In early June, after four months of multichannel collaboration on Slack, email, and Zoom, the first Spanish PDR session came to life.
What set the session apart was its interactivity, Singaraju says. A Spanish-speaking facilitator encouraged partners to share ideas openly, ask more questions, and be more engaged. “The first Spanish session ran longer than usual, but not one attendee dropped off,” he recalls.
Josh Citron, solution engineering manager at Freshworks, says the localization efforts evoke the company’s values. “Now we deliver the PDR sessions in three languages within LATAM and are seeing great results from our partners. Karthik and Alberto are helping change the way we work with partners to drive meaningful growth for the future."
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