What was not working
The first campaign emailed translation agencies with no particular reason to write to them, and got no replies. The usual fallbacks were not available either: automated access to LinkedIn was blocked, and the API keys for the paid lead data tools had stopped working.
Rather than fix the tooling, we went back to the question underneath it: who buys translation, and where do they say so in public?
The buying signal: public procurement
Public bodies have to publish what they buy. A translation tender is a buyer saying, in writing, that they need the service now. And every awarded contract names a winner, often an agency that will need subcontractors for language pairs it does not cover.
So the radar collects two lists: open tenders to bid on, and recent award winners to approach for subcontracting work.
How the radar works
- It reads three official sources: the EU's tender database (TED), the Dutch national tender platform and the UK government's contracts service
- All three have free public APIs that need no key, so the lead source costs nothing to run
- Each run writes open tenders and recent awards to a spreadsheet, with contact details wherever the notice prints them
- Rows that were not there on the previous run are flagged as new, so a weekly look takes minutes
Where the leads go
Leads land in a CRM built for the agencies, kept separate from any other business's data. Each organisation has one record that moves from lead to prospect to client. Every email, call, LinkedIn message or reply is logged against it, and the database refuses an outbound touch that does not say which brand it went out under. The record then knows who has been contacted, by which agency and how often, so two brands never pitch the same buyer by accident.
The takeaway
Before automating outreach, find a real reason to write. A public buying signal beats a bigger list every time, and here it costs nothing.