Recently launched in ABLE Innovations' GlobalViews Newsletter is our much talked about Pink Ink series of articles. Because of their popularity, we have decided to make them available via download. We hope you will leverage the concepts to help establish or improve your company's ability to maximize its global objectives and revenue while minimizing the flow of Pink Ink. Please don't hesitate to contact us with feedback, questions or for assistance.

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About the Pink Ink Series:

We wanted to profile a trend, recently substantiated with industry research by CommonSenseAdvisory, of the real opportunity cost of revenues lost as a result of an overly-narrow domestic focus that leads to missed localization opportunities.

Pink Ink 1

The first article titled, "Localization and ROI: Increasing Value by Eliminating Pink Ink." is part one of our series. This issue highlights why it's important to understand the real cost of companies using distributors to do localization and how to take a more "balanced" approach to developing a plan to take back control, expand the selling cycle and lower localization costs.

For some, the pushback will be that they are afraid they don't know how to do any of this (which is why distributors are doing it). But relying heavily on overseas distributors results in revenue erosion to the tune of 50% for many US companies. These are huge hidden costs that can be reclaimed, and we'll show you how.

Pink Ink 2

Welcome to the second installment of our three part series. In our last article, we introduced you to the concept of 'Pink Ink' and how you can help serve your overseas customers better while increasing profitable international sales by taking control of globalizing your products. The message in Pink Ink 2 titled "Localization and Advanced Technology: Achieving 'SimShip'" continues on this theme with a discussion of how advanced technology can help companies regain foregone revenue and help to achieve a global release that is completely in sync with the domestic one. Likewise, if SimShip is ignored, it is the single largest contributor to Pink Ink.

But SimShip alone is not the ultimate goal for the globally-minded organization. In the pursuit of better channel management, a company usually starts to take a hard look at how they approach internationalization of products and motivate people to meet global objectives. We will address the needs of managers who are charged with effecting a plan to take control of the localization process (even if you keep the distributor); are chartered with finding ways to minimize the cost of engineering and QA (which have traditionally accompanied language reengineering work); and are ultimately responsible for getting products and/or updates to market sooner (without sacrificing quality).

In the end, if companies can command earlier market entry, and synchronize revision cycles, it can wipe out a big part of pink ink and expand the product life cycle. And that is the goal, after all: Who wouldn't want their localized product spending twice as much time in its marketplace generating revenue?

Pink Ink 3

The third article in our series titled "Localization Success: It's All About People" will address people and reward-system changes that reach deep into the organization and that require support from top leadership.

In previous articles, we looked at how to grow international revenue through better channel management, which includes the use of advanced technology to achieve simultaneous shipment (SimShip). But SimShip is only one of the core strategies to reducing pink ink. If half of the foregone opportunity or pink ink is recovered from channel management—recapturing the margin by controlling localization, improving the quality and reducing time-to-market through use of advanced technology—lack of vision and motivation provided to people on the front lines to internationalize products and processes is the other half.

Instilling a global mentality and incentivizing people to develop global products that are in sync with global objectives is not a quick fix. But if upper management motivates or rewards only timely domestic release, they sacrifice the global release, with no escape from pink ink. So if people aren't thusly motivated, internationalization doesn't get done. And if internationalization doesn't get done, long-term global objectives can't be accomplished.

When management values this foregone opportunity and can fully appreciate what they've been losing and why, they can empower their people to clean up all facets of pink ink. The vision and motivation must start at the top. The problems of pink ink begin and end in the board room.