by Nelia Fahloun and Cécile Joffrin

Our presentation will focus on an experiment carried out by ourselves, two English and Spanish to French translators, in April-May 2014, with a view to identify and obtain new direct clients.

We used the Get Clients Now!TM programme (book and website) as a framework to organize our individual marketing efforts and supported each other throughout the 4-week programme. We aim to show how a collaboration between colleagues who could be seen as competitors can become a success thanks to a high level of trust and to the accountability feature of the programme.

After a brief description of our respective profiles, including the specificities of our respective locations (Paris vs. Brittany) and specialisations (medical and international development vs. marketing/editorial and legal), we will  present the main elements of the Get Clients Now! programme, focusing not on the book itself but on its key take-away messages: examine the current state of one’s business, understand the marketing cycle, identify some steps forward, design a well-structured 4-week plan and subdivide it in regular actions in order to create a marketing routine that should become integral part of one’s daily operations.

We will then explain how we worked individually and together and how our mutual support was pivotal to the success of our endeavours, with examples of the results achieved.

Finally, we will offer an overall review of the prerequisites for following such a programme, its strengths and weaknesses, the potential pitfalls, the challenges we faced and how we tried to address them, and the impact on our personal relationship.