TransPerfect - Global Sales Team of the Year

Company: TransPerfect
Company Description: Localization and Translation Services
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Global Sales Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Jess Eker Team

Jess is a Senior Vice President of Sales at TransPerfect with an 18-year track record of continuously exceeding goals. During that time, Jess has grown a global team of 100+ sales representatives across 14 countries that together have achieved unprecedented growth in the company. TransPerfect billed over $1 Billion in revenue in 2021, and this team was an integral part of this monumental achievement. Under Jess’s leadership, they have:

-Billed $213M in 2021 (25%, or $42 million, year-over-year growth from $171M in 2020)

-Achieved growth of 16% and $23M in YoY growth from 2019 and $148M in 2019 from 2018

-Reached 112% of their sales goal for 2021

-Overseen eight of TransPerfect’s top 20 highest revenue clients

Jess’s team includes more senior managers than any other team in the company, including:

-One vice president
-Seven Regional directors
-Six sales managers

This team also focuses on philanthropic work, leading TransPerfect as the company’s #1 fundraiser for the V Foundation with over $15k raised for cancer research. Within TransPerfect, Jess co-founded and is on the board of the employee-led affinity group Working Women, whose mission is to accelerate the advancement, empowerment, and leadership of working women at TransPerfect.

The team worked tirelessly to fast track the translations required to bring COVID-19 vaccines to market as urgently as possible. Each member put in tremendous effort and sleepless nights to deliver and enable sponsors to meet their deadlines. For Moderna, they delivered in five business days that which would have normally taken two months—expediting the process by 80%. They are proud to have played their part in getting us one step closer to ending the pandemic. Multiple team members were nominated and won awards for sales excellence and sales leadership categories in recognition of the hard work and trust they built with their clients. Recognizing that their strength lies in their diverse skill set, they are also working with leadership to build out TransPerfect’s diversity, equity, and inclusion program.

In the face of a global pandemic, this team not only persevered but also was able to grow by $42M from 2020 and by $23M from 2019. In 18 months, Jess’s team worked on:

- 3,000+ COVID-19-related translation projects
- 20+ unique COVID-19 studies
- 20M+ words translated for over 10 pharmaceuticals and clinical research organizations on COVID-19 vaccine-related work

Not only did the team deliver quality translations to ensure they met their critical deadlines, but they also far exceeded expectations. In 2021, they led the strategy, organization, and execution of TransPerfect’s annual sales conference in Barcelona, which hosted 200+ attendees. They also organized the life sciences’ track for our industry conference, GlobalLink NEXT, which had over 150 industry attendees across heavy hitters like Pfizer, Sanofi, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb.

They continue to develop strategy for the larger global life sciences sales practice group, which at $321M is the largest spend inside of TransPerfect and which represented $50M in year over year growth. They run weekly team training scrimmages across the 130+ life sciences salespeople, giving guidance on thought leadership creation, event and tradeshow selection, and professional development. Planning ahead, they have organized the thought leadership program for 2022 across life sciences, which has resulted in over 30 new thought leadership pieces including blogs, case studies, webinars, and events.

“It has been a pleasure to work with the TransPerfect team. Their remarkable experience, guidance, and responsiveness have been greatly appreciated.

Your partnership is extremely valuable to help us expedite the registration process and the availability of our vaccine worldwide.

Looking forward to continuing this effective collaboration.” – Moderna

“I wanted to take a second to commend the incredible work the Translation team has done to support the COVID 19 team. Despite the fast, frantic, exciting, and always-on nature of the job the team has done a phenomenal job reacting to last minute requests in a professional manner while maintaining an exceptional level of quality.

The team has risen to the occasion in the best possible way. We’re down to the wire for many approvals and the team has managed to turn around complex updates in hours while keeping the quality that’s demanded. From working inconvenient hours to finding clever solutions they’ve represented the best of Operations.

There’s still a lot of work on the horizon but I wanted to pause to recognize their work to date which would not be possible without your leadership. THANK YOU!” - Pfizer