103 episodes

Thrive in Global Markets is a unique podcast for entrepreneurs, managing directors, and executives who are frustrated with their growth in their home market and want to expand internationally.

The podcast is intended to share practical tips, delve deep into the personal experience of successful entrepreneurs, and discuss what makes international communications successful and impactful.

Hear from the experts, ask questions, and brainstorm ideas to move your business forward into new markets by selling internationally.

Innovative and energising, Thrive in Global Markets is your gateway to global business.

Thrive in Global Markets Levent Yildizgoren

    • Business
    • 5.0 • 25 Ratings

Thrive in Global Markets is a unique podcast for entrepreneurs, managing directors, and executives who are frustrated with their growth in their home market and want to expand internationally.

The podcast is intended to share practical tips, delve deep into the personal experience of successful entrepreneurs, and discuss what makes international communications successful and impactful.

Hear from the experts, ask questions, and brainstorm ideas to move your business forward into new markets by selling internationally.

Innovative and energising, Thrive in Global Markets is your gateway to global business.

    10 reasons why technical authors love working with us - Part 1

    10 reasons why technical authors love working with us - Part 1

    Technical authors are highly skilled at presenting complex information clearly, using very precise vocabulary. They have strong attention to detail and comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter they are writing about.

    When a technical writer requires one of their documents to be translated, it is crucial that it be performed accurately — maintaining the meaning of any specialized terminology and ensuring that the document remains easy to understand.
    In this episode of 'Thrive in Global Markets' podcast, join your host Levent Yildizgoren to learn the first 5 things important to technical authors in their translation journeys.
    For more content like this, check out TTC wetranslate company LinkedIn page and make sure you register for new audio events every Wednesday and follow us live: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ttcwetranslate 

    • 26 min
    • video
    Special Episode: 10th year of Translation Challenge with Russell Armstrong

    Special Episode: 10th year of Translation Challenge with Russell Armstrong

    In this special episode of the Thrive in Global Markets podcast, we welcome Russell Armstrong, inventor of hotun detect and the hotun dry trap tundish and the Managing Director of RA Tech. RA Tech is the sponsor of this year's Translation Challenge competition.
    Translation Challenge has been running for 10 years and provides translation students with the opportunity to gain real-world experience by working on a translation project for a real client and this year, the students will be translating for Russell's company and product.
    In this episode, Russell expresses his expectations for the competition and the potential benefits for his company's international expansion by having a translated homepage that can be used to test different international markets.
    ABOUT THE HOST
    Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager.
    CONTACT METHOD
    Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/ 
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren 
    IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/ 
    ABOUT THE GUEST
    Russell Armstrong is inventor of hotun detect and the hotun dry trap tundish and the Managing Director of RA Tech and the sponsor of Translation Challenge 2023.
    CONTACT METHOD
    https://hotun.co.uk/ 
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-armstrong-mciphe-a6356186/ 
    VALUABLE RESOURCES
    Want to learn more about the Translation Challenge competition? Visit our landing page: https://ttcwetranslate.com/about/translation-challenge/ 

    • 13 min
    Seamless Customer Experience with Edith Bendermacher

    Seamless Customer Experience with Edith Bendermacher

    Edith Bendermacher is the Director of Globalization Strategy and Localization Operations at NetApp, based in San Jose, California. Focused on the end goal of delivering the best global Customer Experience, her team is responsible for the strategic planning and execution of globalization across all departments, including delivery, innovation, uptake, and return of the globalization investments. Under her lead, the Globalization Center of Excellence provides localized offerings in up to 15 languages.
    Edith is a regular speaker on globalization in panels and globalization industry events. Edith is also a member of the Women in Technology Group at NetApp. Starting in 2022, she became the Program Director of the Women in Localization Marketing Program. Additionally, Edith’s passion is developing and mentoring rising localization professionals through programs such as MIIS/NetApp Professional Coordinated Studies.
    KEY TAKEAWAYS
    The customer experience is a vital part of your business and understanding customers from all perspectives can help you deliver successful services. Customer journey stages are the key to this success. Based on your business model, there can be even seven stages but in general, there are a discovery stage, evaluation stage, purchase stage, deployment, or support stage. Each customer journey stage has a different set of content that is required in order to satisfy the customer’s needs.
    BEST MOMENTS
    “From a globalization point of view, the best customer experience means a seamless experience across the websites and platforms that we have across the products and content that we have. So when the customer starts the journey with NetApp, they should be able to find all the relevant information that they need to make informed choices with.”
    “The native language is a way to quickly browse, digest and memorize and filter all that information and accelerate the business outcome. Right. It can help to choose the right product it can help to fix an issue and it can help to provide a tool to learn about the product.”
    “There's the discovery stage and then there's the evaluation stage. Everybody has to discover the company and everybody evaluates a company. So we looked in depth, what are the pieces of content that fall into these categories. So for example, product and solution descriptions, right or customer references, or even technical documentation needs to be accessible in language at that stage in order for the customer to figure out and discover what is it that we do and then also to evaluate if our product and our solutions are the ones that they need in order to be successful.”
    “So we don't localize just to localize. We really make an effort to really understand what are the important pieces of the customer journey and what brings the biggest value to our customers.”
    ABOUT THE HOST
    Sıla Erol started her journey at TTC wetranslate Ltd as a Project Coordinator and has been continuing as a Key Account Manager after graduating from Translation and Interpreting Department at Ege University in Izmir/Turkey.
    CONTACT METHOD
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/sılaerol
    https://ttcwetranslate.com/
    ABOUT THE GUEST
    Edith Bendermacher is Director of Globalization Strategy and Localization Operations at NetApp, based in San Jose, California.
    CONTACT METHOD
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/edith-bendermacher-859b492/
    VALUABLE RESOURCES
    Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/
    Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR

    • 28 min
    Globalization: Hitting the Right Tones with Anna Schlegel

    Globalization: Hitting the Right Tones with Anna Schlegel

    Anna Schlegel is VP of Product, Global Infrastructure, International Markets, and Globalization at Procore Technologies, co-founder of Women in Localization, a non-profit based on 30 worldwide sites with 7000 global members, and the author of "Truly Global '', awarded as the best book on international markets by Book Authority for the past 3 years. Anna has led globalization teams at top technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Cisco, VeriSign, VMware, Xerox, and NetApp. Her work has been published in Forbes, Fortune, the European Union, Gala-Global, Multilingual, and many other industry forums. Anna has consulted for Google's International Product Team throughout her career and is a requested speaker at the Berkeley Haas Institute, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and Stanford University.
    In December 2021, Anna was awarded the "Creu de Sant Jordi" Medal of Honor by the Catalan Government for her leading efforts in Technology and Business, considered the highest honor as a Catalan national.
    You can reach Anna’s first episode here: https://apple.co/3CX8uSf
    KEY TAKEAWAYS
    The process of globalization can be long and tedious, but with patience, you will find that it is worth your time. You should hit the right tone for each company so they know what kind of approach would work best in their situation; this could depend on many factors such as business goals and objectives.
    BEST MOMENTS
    “Who wants you prepared the product or the solution or the idea? How are you going to make it known? Because you can make something beautiful to go into another country. But if you don't announce it, and you don't learn also from the feedback of the local customer or consumer, you're not going to improve that product.”
    “Globalization teams tend to be typically under marketing or under engineering or under product, many, many teams are under product. And that's, to begin with, but that we want these globalizers to not stay in one team to either do rotations or to be at the level of a CMO or chief product officer or a chief data officer or whatever.”
    “One huge mistake is to localize everything that moves if there's not enough of a machinery to start the pilot going to a beta and then go to a general availability. You can pilot things, but I'm sometimes against piloting themes that you can already see that nobody's going to be able to support to go global. So these are business decisions.”
    “After you've done it a few times, I think it's to remain steady to play the guardrails. And something that can be hard is the amount of times you have to explain it or evangelize or try to redirect where the conversation is going. Because a lot of people have the title of global and they've seen it done one way or a couple of ways. And so you need to align a lot of different opinions.”
    ABOUT THE HOST
    Sıla Erol started her journey at TTC wetranslate Ltd as a Project Coordinator and has been continuing as a Key Account Manager after graduating from Translation and Interpreting Department at Ege University in Izmir/Turkey.
    CONTACT METHOD
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/sılaerol
    https://ttcwetranslate.com/
    ABOUT THE GUEST
    Anna Schlegel is VP of Product, Global Infrastructure, International Markets, and Globalization at Procore Technologies, co-founder of Women in Localization, and the author of "Truly Global ''.
    CONTACT METHOD
    www.trulyglobalbusiness.com
    Twitter/Instagram:  @annapapallona
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/annanschlegel/
    VALUABLE RESOURCES
    Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/
    Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR

    • 41 min
    Decoding Consumer Behaviour with Tugce Bulut

    Decoding Consumer Behaviour with Tugce Bulut

    Tugce Bulut is the founder and CEO of Streetbees which connects with real people in real-time through conversational AI, capturing the reality of everyday life. While working as a strategic advisor, Tugce Bulut was continually exposed to the limitations of the traditional consumer intelligence space, which was struggling to uncover growth opportunities as they continue to use outdated survey methods that relied on unrealistic claims of professional survey takers. In 2015, Tugce founded Streetbees to build a marketplace for the world’s largest companies and organisations to truly build an intimate relationship with their consumers.
    In a short time, Streetbees has become an indispensable tool for the world’s largest companies, such as Pepsico, Unilever, Nestle and a number of governmental organisations and hedge funds. Streetbees now has over five million users globally and c.200 employees in London and Lisbon offices, as well as a global remote team.
    KEY TAKEAWAYS
    With the recent advances in conversational AI, it's now easier than ever to understand how consumers behave differently across cultures. But one thing that should never be forgotten about each country is its unique set of happiness and satisfaction scores which will affect what statistics are used when considering product/service quality.
    BEST MOMENTS
    “You realize the variances in behavioural courage and how people perceive things differently, how that influences their demand for consumer products as well. So it definitely allowed us to think about how do we capture that level of granularity and differentiation in consumer demands in international trade.”
    “One thing you also need to correct for statistically is people's expression of levels of happiness, etc is also very different. We always talk about French unhappiness. If you're looking at comparing globally about a given product, the average French score categorically will be lower than your average Indian score, Indonesian score, Turkish score, etc.”
    “You need to be market specific by market meaning countries but even sometimes within the countries there might be subgroups and you need to really understand who's buying this, who's your audience, and make sure your messaging on the brand, on the packaging, even the materials you use on the packaging, etc resonates with that particular audience group. It is all about precision now.”
    “It's really the people that you brought together who keeps that innovative culture. I think a couple of things you're going to hire the right type of people to begin with, and there's nothing wrong with being either type. They have different jobs. Now as a scaler where we are with the company, the innovative group is a smaller percentage of the business because we also need people who can maintain systems, build processes which is a different type of personality. For innovative part, it's important to engage them in the interview process.” 
    “Everyone is different, and everyone's cultural code is very different. And the reason why we become very successful in integrating different teams is that because we train our teams not to make assumptions and not to expect certain behavioural courage.”
    ABOUT THE HOST
    Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager.
    CONTACT METHOD
    Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren
    IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/
    ABOUT THE GUEST
    Tugce Bulut is the founder and CEO of Streetbees which connects with real people in real-time through conversational AI, capturing the reality of everyday life.
    CONTACT METHOD
    www.streetbees.com
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/tugce-bulut/
    https://www.linkedin.com/company/streetbees/
    VALUABLE RESOURCES
    Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit T

    • 34 min
    Uber's Global Aspects with Pia Bresnan

    Uber's Global Aspects with Pia Bresnan

    Pia Bresnan is Senior Localization Manager at Uber. She was technically born in NY but is a Citizen of the world. She spent her childhood in Europe before coming back to the US for her under-grad studies in International Relations. Pia started her second career in Localization at a single language vendor, learning the ropes from the linguists' perspective then worked her way up the value chain, now at for the past 4 years leading a team of Localization Program Managers at Uber.  She has over 18+ years of Localization strategy experience with extensive hands-on operational know-how, managing global teams. She combines a strong instinct for stakeholder empathy and a keen understanding of their challenges with a pragmatic and efficient ability to lead cross-cultural teams to "get stuff done”. Pia lives in the Bay Area with her family. 
    KEY TAKEAWAYS
    It's possible to maintain a global image while adjusting to the local requirements if you understand your target audience.
    Speaking multiple languages is not necessary for a successful career in a multinational company as long as you can understand the markets you are dealing with.
    Even the way we greet one another has a huge impact on the localization process and shows how we should be taking every aspect of a culture into account.
    BEST MOMENTS
    "Customers don’t use uber because it’s an American company, they use uber because it’s serving their purpose."
    "We recognize that the way we developed Uber is not suitable for each country. Take India for example. Not only the bandwidth is very different but also the socioeconomic level of our drives is different. So we need to adjust to being able to operate in India in an efficient way."
    "It's been a journey to educate everyone to understand that we are a global company. Yes, the majority of the problems we are trying to solve are for English Speaking countries but you need to be aware that you cannot simply say 'Do you need a knife and a fork with your Uber Eats order?' in Japan because it doesn't translate to anything."
    ABOUT THE HOST
    Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager.
    CONTACT METHOD
    Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren
    IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/
    ABOUT THE GUEST
    Pia Bresnan is Senior Localization Manager at Uber.
    CONTACT METHOD
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/pia-f-bresnan-8186765/
    https://www.uber.com
    VALUABLE RESOURCES
    Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/
    Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR

    • 28 min

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5
25 Ratings

25 Ratings

Dinghyracer ,

Insightful in International Trade

Levent is a great listener and always manages to tease out insightful material from his guests !

B through C ,

Amazing guests

Levent and his team really have hand picked some industry greats to support the listeners through whatever it is they are trying to acheive.

Simple & Easy listening, definitly worth meandering through some of the interviews, I always find something of particular interest.

Moja_Zoe ,

Fascinating insights

A great podcast sharing fascinating insights from expert guests. Actionable advice to make an impact in your industry.

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