Why Localization Belongs In The Boardroom

Jason Hemingway: Welcome to In other words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with business leaders, shaping how organizations grow, adapt, and connect with customers around the world. I’m Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, and today we’re challenging a mindset that still dominates too many boardrooms. Why is localization seen as a cost center when it touches every part of how your brand shows up in the world? From product to marketing, sales conversations to support articles, localization shapes almost every customer’s touchpoint, yet it’s often treated as an afterthought. So joining me today to discuss is someone who’s been changing that narrative inside global businesses for absolute years.

Jason Hemingway: Nataly Kelly is currently CMO at Zappi, and former

Jason Hemingway: VP of Marketing at HubSpot, where she played a huge role in driving their growth from 170 million to 1.7 billion ARR in leading marketing and international strategy and localization across some, you know, I think it’s 120 plus countries. She’s also an author of, in her own right of many books, and the latest one being

Jason Hemingway: Brand Global, Adapt Local and founder of Born to Be Global, and a longtime contributor to the Harvard Business Review.

Jason Hemingway: Nataly, welcome. It’s great to have you with us.

Nataly Kelly: Thank you for having me, Jason. Lovely to be here.

Jason Hemingway: Absolute pleasure. So let’s get going, and one of the questions I always like to talk to people about is their career. And you’ve held, you know, many, many senior roles in marketing and international strategy, and localization, of course, at some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. But can you take a step back from where you are today and walk us through your career journey, and what led you to focus so strongly on this kind of idea of brand growth, global brand growth?

Nataly Kelly: Well, I started as a Spanish interpreter.

Nataly Kelly: That was my first job out of college as an interpreter for

Nataly Kelly: AT&T Language Line back in the day, speaking on behalf of many patients, customers, you know, people, I was their voice. And I realized in that job how hard it is to communicate across cultures, even in one-to-one communications, let alone one-to-many.

Nataly Kelly: From there, I became a Fulbright scholar, and I went and did research on sociolinguistics in Ecuador. And when I came back, I worked for another language services company, building products for them. I was in charge of product development there, so I led development of a cultural competence training for healthcare professionals and video interpreting services and worked on their translation and their telephone interpreting services.

Nataly Kelly: From there, I went and worked at CSA Research, which is a pretty well-known organization in this industry. I was the chief research officer there after a stint as an analyst and consultant. And then, after that, I moved to Smartling, where I was VP of marketing. Then I moved to HubSpot, where I worked for almost eight years.

Nataly Kelly: As you mentioned, Jason, first as a VP of marketing, then I led international operations and strategy and launched offices around the world for HubSpot. Then really focused on localization, globalization, driving that. Then I moved to become a chief growth officer at a tech company called Rebrandly, where I oversaw sales, product and marketing.

Nataly Kelly: And then, I moved to Zappi, where I’m the CMO today. So that’s my career journey in a nutshell.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. I mean, and it is a journey, isn’t it? I mean, what an interesting place to start and then get to, you know, all the way to where you are today as the CMO. So you’ve led, it looks like it’s, you know, fast growth businesses, but also scaling and mature organizations.

Jason Hemingway: And I guess the first question I’d have to, you know, from a professional capacity across that journey is, why do you think that localization, multilingual communication with customers is still seen as this kind of cost center stroke afterthoughts in so many sorts of boardrooms or senior levels?

Nataly Kelly: I think a lot of it is in how we position it.

Nataly Kelly: And often how it’s viewed as an afterthought of like – Oh, we wanna do business with people who speak this language, so therefore we need to localize or adapt these communications or do – these things. But I also think in the localization industry, it can be easy to just accept that and to say, “Oh, well, they want this, so we’re gonna do that.”

Nataly Kelly: As a kind of an order-taker relationship. I think what’s really hard to do is to be seen as strategic and to tie your value to something like top-line growth for a business, and I think that’s a skill that has to be taught and learned in this industry. And it’s not intuitive. You have to actually pay attention to how business leaders talk about things in order to attach the value to the things that are driving the company forward.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. It’s interesting that attachment, and I guess, you know, you’ve seen it evolve somewhere like HubSpot, for example, from that kind of functional side of things to a kind of strategic part of the business and how it goes to market globally, and how did you approach that, making that business case early on, and get that leadership team aligned?

Nataly Kelly: Well, I was kind of lucky at HubSpot that localization was viewed as something strategic, tied to growth. But it’s not enough to have that be a general opinion; it needs to be specific. What I mean is most companies won’t invest a penny in localization unless they see growth behind it in some future scenario.

Nataly Kelly: But what often happens is it’s not directly tied to a specific outcome. So what I started to measure, and I had my team measure, was what is the specific growth of these countries that don’t speak English? What’s that install base look like, and how much are we spending on localization for that language?

Nataly Kelly: And so I had measures of language-influenced revenue, you know, localization-influenced revenue, because I wanted to tie localization and the languages to the growth impact, so I could show, oh look, non-English markets are lifting up our overall global growth by 4% points, that we wouldn’t have if we didn’t invest in localization.

Nataly Kelly: You know, international in general is lifting up our growth rate by this percentage, and it’s unlocking this many millions of dollars of revenue. Being able to talk about it that way gives not only you, but your team and people throughout the company, the ability to defend localization as something that is powering the growth of the company.

Nataly Kelly: But it’s hard to do that if you can’t quantify it, and if you can’t give business metrics that really matter to the C-suite, yeah, then you’re kind of always gonna be viewed as a center.

Jason Hemingway: So it is almost, you know, like you say, it’s attaching yourself to the value that the business wants to drive and then finding those key metrics.

Jason Hemingway: So, what should they start in discovering those key metrics? I mean, how did you go away and discover that? You know, did you have a thesis that you went to? Did you talk to some of the other leaders? What advice would you give to those marketing or product, or localization teams, kind of, trying to get a place to sort of begin?

Nataly Kelly: I looked at what my audience cared about, you know, thinking as a marketer, and you know, what are the words that they use? And the number one audience I thought I need to influence is the CEO, you know, the C-suite executives, how are they talking about the future of the company?

Nataly Kelly: Because what they talk about is what everybody else will talk about and what everybody else will think about. So at HubSpot, the leaders were always talking about, you know, how much monthly recurring revenue do we have and how’s that changing every month? And it’s a very metrics-focused company, so it’s pretty easy to get a lot of the data. It wasn’t so easy at first to get the country-specific cuts of that data. I had to, over time, schmooze the right people, you know, be some of the people who owned a lot of the data sources, so that I could figure out a way to get that information and use it for my purposes, but I really pay close attention to what the CEO was saying, what the leadership team was saying, what the CFO talked about in terms of financial metrics.

Nataly Kelly: What do our investors care about? You know, I would listen to our public earnings calls, and I would think, okay, if I’m an investor, why would I support further investment in localization, further investment in international growth as opposed to investing that same money in some other thing, you know, because I think what localization folks often forget is that’s one of many choices you could use to grow your business. For us, it’s the obvious choice, ’cause we have our own proximity bias to this industry, and we think it matters hugely. But if I’m a CEO, I might be thinking, could it be easier to just launch a new product or acquire another company to add growth at the top line?

Nataly Kelly: Maybe that’s a simpler way to grow. Maybe I don’t wanna invest in localization. That sounds complex and scary, you know? So I think it’s important that if a company is indicating that they want to invest in that, that we keep feeding them the ammunition to continue it and making sure that they know what value it’s delivering, because otherwise it’s thankless work that nobody cares about.

Nataly Kelly: No, 100%, and then it’s easy to chop it off. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I think there’s an element in there that you discussed that’s really important. It’s also that idea of what’s the quickest way to do it, you know, is the quickest way to do it to acquire somebody, and people think, oh yeah, that’s easy.

Jason Hemingway: I’ll acquire that business in that market. That’s also very hard work to do. You’ve gotta integrate it. You might have cultural nuance involved in there as well. So it’s not quite as simple as that. So I think, you know, everything that we talk about as a business and I talk about, you know, aligns completely with what you’re saying, which is, you know, you’ve got to speak the language of the boardroom, but also know what the key drivers for the business are.

Jason Hemingway: So I guess the advice, if I’m gonna summarize from you, really is get involved in those conversations. Go and tap up the people for what really is interesting. Listen to the CEO, listen to the investors. So, I guess that’s sort of part of the advice; work out your prioritization and how you kind of figure it out. But I think there’s a key part there, for me, it’s like for localization to shift, it is incumbent on those teams to kind of go out and court that kind of idea. And I think they’re doing more of it now. I think more people are trying to get into that zone of not being a service to the business, but really thinking we’re a driver and we need to be, we need to have our seat at the table.

Jason Hemingway: Do you see that as well?

Nataly Kelly: Yes, I do. And I think it’s empowering to think that way, that you know, you can make an impact on the strategy of the business, but it also requires humility to realize we might not be the most important thing on people’s minds. And so accepting that, but approaching them with curiosity of like, okay, how can I help you achieve your goals? Because I’ve seen this over and over, where localization teams approach another team, and they wanna tell them everything. They’re like, here’s why you should do this, and here’s what you need to know, and here’s how to work with us, and here’s the file formats, and here, and it’s like information overload.

Nataly Kelly: I think we gain so much trust from our stakeholders when we say, tell me about your goals. Who’s in your org? Who should I interact with? How does your org work? You know, and really taking a step back to understand like what are their priorities? How can we map to them? That gives you so much more sway from a relationship perspective.

Nataly Kelly: And I’ve seen this over and over the teams that my localization project managers engage with the best. They would go to bat for us in budget season, they would say, oh, well we can’t possibly defund the localization team. In fact, my remarketing stakeholders for my German market. At one point we had one localization specialist for German.

Nataly Kelly: They went into budgeting season and asked the CMO for five. They were like, we need five more of him. That’s how we will grow. And I didn’t have to say a word because they were my advocates, but they are also the budget holders. So they wanted to spend their marketing budget on localization because they saw the value in collaborating with my team, and so I think it’s really important that we understand how to influence within organizations at all levels, you know, and honestly, for the C-suite.

Nataly Kelly: Most localization folks don’t get access. I was lucky I happened to sit next to the CEO in the office, you know, I did occasionally get his ear, he was never at his desk. But you know, I did occasionally get a word in. But ultimately it doesn’t matter because even if you have the ear of the CEO, they’re not the ones who are making all those decisions.

Nataly Kelly: They delegate to their teams, and you have to influence at every level on every team to make a big impact as a localization team. So, it is kind of like internal marketing is what I often would tell my team. It’s like we have an internal marketing campaign that we have to run to create massive influence and awareness of the value that we bring.

Jason Hemingway: I think you’re right. And I think there is that misconception, kind of, you have to talk to the C-suite. Talk to the people around the C-suite, and you’ll probably get more out of it because they’re the ones who know, and they can aggregate the view of the C-suite. And actually one of the bits of advice you just said there, which I really like as well, is make some friends.

Jason Hemingway: Listen. Start listening to people. Listen to their pains, and try and match it up with what you are doing because it should all, you know, I always think that the company is all trying to go in the same direction most of the time, albeit sometimes different departments have slightly different skews, but you are all trying to make your business successful, so work out how you do it with that other team is really, really good advice. So, let’s take it; that was very internal focus. Let’s move out a little bit and think, you know, outside in and a bit more about this idea of cultural fluency that you write in the book, you know, in Brand Global, Adapt Local.

Jason Hemingway: You talk about the importance of this idea of cultural fluency. What does that look like in terms of practice for today’s global brand or business?

Nataly Kelly: Yes, so it’s a big topic, and as you mentioned, Jason, we talk about it in the book. Cultural fluency is something that you need internally and externally, but when you show up as a brand, you need to really be able to adapt to the local market needs. And we talk about this in the book, you know, making sure that you know where to flex and where to stay consistent is really very tricky, and especially in this day and age because things are so interconnected, and you’ve got the digital world, but you’ve got the physical world.

Nataly Kelly: You’ve got online and offline. You have to balance both and how you show up in local spaces, but also that your online presence matches what you see offline. So you know what that looks like in practice is you feel connected to the brand, and you feel like it resonates, and the messaging, and you know, the positioning, everything resonates for where you are in the world.

Nataly Kelly: Not just in person, online as well. And it’s not just about one campaign or one ad or one billboard or you know, whatever format you wanna talk about; one webpage. It’s about every communication touchpoint. And so having your brand guidelines really clear and then adapting them in the right places is so important because, you know, I’ve seen companies that try to have like a global brand standard and apply it uniformly in every market. It doesn’t work that way. If you do that, it’s gonna be a cookie-cutter approach. We all know this. We’ve seen this in localization over and over, and what it really boils down to is knowing where to adapt and how to adapt. And so marketers and localization professionals should be BFFs because they have the same goal.

Nataly Kelly: They’re trying to make sure that the customer has a good experience, a relevant experience in every market. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s just that one will call it resonating and the other, we’ll call it localized.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nataly Kelly: But it’s really

Nataly Kelly: this.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, no, I think you’re right. And I think about it as, in terms of customer engagement terms, so it’s like, you know, you want to build that engaging communication with the customer, that the customer feels is valuable to them.

Jason Hemingway: And you can do, you can use, you know, communicating in their language in whatever format as a way of doing that. I think I always say this, and if any regular listeners feel free to post, but I constantly talk about this idea of when we think about personalization, we often think about personalization from an English perspective.

Jason Hemingway: You know, this is, personalization is actually – if you can’t personalize it in terms of the person’s language, first language they speak, then you’re already off the mark in my view. So it becomes quite interesting when you think about it in that sense, when you think, oh, what does it mean to be personal?

Jason Hemingway: And I think, speaking of the customer’s language and resonating with their culture is actually really important. And I love this idea that you have, which is this idea of there are certain things that the business, you know, is non-negotiable for the business. There are certain assets, things that you do, logos, whatever it might be, or brand assets that need to be consistent to maintain the brand, that are also things that can flex, like the adaptable assets idea.

Jason Hemingway: So I think that’s interesting. And you do talk to people about how to sort of go about doing that in the book. And you talked, one interesting point you just said, and I really like the idea of a customer journey. I think we often, as marketers, think about acquisition only and maybe a bit of retention, but you know, it’s two separate things, but it is a journey.

Jason Hemingway: And I think you talked about every touch point, because every touch point matters when a customer interacts with you. They’re not thinking, well, I’m interacting with the service team now, so I’ll let them not know who I am, or all of those things that frustrate you as a customer when you’ve tried so hard to communicate effectively to get that person to be a customer.

Jason Hemingway: So, in your view, thinking about that kind of journey aspect, are there parts of the journey that people don’t consider or that are most overlooked but actually are really important parts for maintaining trust, and that kind of perception of the brand?

Nataly Kelly: Oh, so many, I mean, what you value is often very culturally rooted.

Nataly Kelly: And so, for example, in Japan, the idea of customer experience is very different. You know, I wrote this in the book, but one of the things I learned when HubSpot went into Japan and launched our office there was, the notion of customer service is very different. So in the U.S, we say the customer is always right.

Nataly Kelly: In Japan, they say the customer is God.

Jason Hemingway: Okay? Yeah.

Nataly Kelly: That’s a big difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big difference. The level of respect and the understanding of how you should treat a customer is quite elevated. It’s not just that they’re correct, they’re up here, they’re very in a different power dynamic, so, and maybe that’s warranted because the customers do end up paying the bills, and you know, keep our businesses going. So I kinda like the Japanese version of this better, but another example of where I think a lot of companies get it wrong is with payments. So, you know, I did at HubSpot, a customer experience.

Nataly Kelly: I love that you mentioned the customer journey, ’cause I did a customer experience survey to ask customers, and partners, and you know, make sure local employees were aware of the results of this; how they would rate HubSpot in different areas of their experience. And was it good, bad? Well, we learned a ton from that survey.

Nataly Kelly: One thing we learned is every country is gonna rate based on their cultural standards of rating. So, no matter what question, Latin America’s more enthusiastic, whether they’re actually happier or not, have better scores. Japan’s gonna be low even for Japanese companies who are not even localizing.

Nataly Kelly: They’re gonna get lower scores. So that was one big finding. But the interesting thing was, when we looked at the relative answers within a language, we saw very interesting things that allowed us to pinpoint aspects of the experience that we could influence. So, for example, in Japan, we noticed that the billing experience was slightly quite a bit lower than some of the other areas.

Nataly Kelly: And we’re like, well, that’s kind of interesting, like why is it so off here? And then we looked, and some other languages had that problem too. So we talked to the finance team, talked to the billing team, talked to the billing specialists, we learned that some of their communications were automated, and they had translations that who knows where they got them from, they weren’t done by my team, and they were going out, and some of them were very American, like, you better pay us or else, you know, kind of, because collections in the U.S can get kind of aggressive sometimes, depending on what culture you’re from. So when we talked to our local customer success folks, they agreed, and they were bilingual, they would say, yeah, this just doesn’t sound appropriate for our culture.

Nataly Kelly: Like, it was a perfectly fine translation. It was accurate. It wasn’t culturally appropriate to say things the way we were saying them, and you know, issues around payment and things can be more sensitive in different cultures, ’cause you’re asking people to give you money. So, you know, I find that billing and payments are a huge one where people don’t necessarily pay enough attention to how things are worded, whether even the time horizons are right, like this is your 60-day warning, or this is your 90-day warning.

Nataly Kelly: Well, is that appropriate in that country where maybe that’s not common, you know, so we got a lot of progress and value by focusing there. And it was not easy because even though there was very little content, it was how do we think about this? And does it require any changes to, maybe that’s gonna impact how we do things, and maybe it will, but to make some estimates like, will this increase, you know, uplift, and will this improve collections and all these? So we had to really partner with that team because again, this is a product that’s sold to many, many thousands of customers. So one small change could mean a massive impact in either direction. So we had to, you know, phase that test, experiment and then, you know, rolled it out to bigger groups of people.

Nataly Kelly: But I feel like that was one of the most valuable things that my team did, and guess what? There aren’t that many words in an email about a billing issue. It’s not that much content. It’s not that much volume, but it’s high impact. So, I think figuring out where the areas that are high impact is something that unlocks a lot of value for any localization team.

Nataly Kelly: And it might not always be the obvious things.

Jason Hemingway: No, I think that’s I mean, tremendous advice. There are a couple of things in there. There’s the idea that there’s lots of teams around the business that will say, you know, we’ve done this, we’ve translated it. Thumbs up to us, we’ve done the right thing.

Jason Hemingway: And it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you might have done that. That’s what we were calling internally. I think it’s kind of picking up, you know, a bit of momentum externally, it’s this idea of shadow localization. It’s like where teams have gone, yeah, yeah, we, we’ve done it. We’ve done it ourselves. Don’t worry about it.

Jason Hemingway: And then, everyone sort of looks here and goes, “actually, that’s really off the mark.” From a cultural relevance point of view, it might be technically the right words, but it’s not the way somebody would say in their local region. I think that’s fantastic. So the advice there is look at all of the journey, think about the high-impact areas.

Jason Hemingway: And then I think the other thing that you sort of hit on, which is another thing that can be quite hard, is actually talking to those teams, and kind of getting them to do the work to think about it, because to them, they’ve solved the problem and they’ve solved the problem. Oh, you’re creating more work for me.

Jason Hemingway: And it’s like, yeah, okay, but your customers aren’t, they’re not gonna like the messages you’re sending, so that experience isn’t gonna work, right?

Nataly Kelly: Well, that’s one thing that my team was always looking very carefully at is which teams want to engage with us, because if there’s not the readiness or they’re going through too much change themselves, or they don’t have a KPI that we feel we can influence in any way.

Nataly Kelly: Then we probably shouldn’t engage at this time. And one of the things, one of the reasons that we did actually focus on the billing team is that they had a project to audit all their comms anyway, and so, it was a natural time for us to fit in because we knew, oh, this is gonna be content that’s, you know, any localization person immediately thinks like, okay, big part of my work here is gonna be auditing the content, ’cause probably nobody’s even thought, what’s the most valuable thing to localize? So that was a good little flag, a green flag of, oh, that’s probably a readiness sign that they might be ready to engage with us and that they’ll value what we’re gonna be, and also nobody wants to localize a bunch of stuff.

Nataly Kelly: Then the next year they do a full content audit, and you have to re-localize everything, and you know, wasted money. So we wanted to make sure we’re engaging at a time that is going to be meaningful, but that takes, again, back to our earlier point of discussion, that takes understanding the strategy, knowing your stakeholders, knowing where you can add value, knowing if you can add value, and if the timing is right to really get engaged with them, so.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I think you’re right. And knowing what’s going on in the rest of the business, what are the key projects to drive the business forward, and then trying to align with them. Okay. Brilliant. So we’ve gone through that. I’m gonna lighten the mood a little, and we ask every guest that comes on that is, we call it our mid-show moment.

Jason Hemingway: And it’s all about automation. So, Nataly, what’s the one thing that you wish you could automate in your workday?

Nataly Kelly: I wish I could automate curation of my Slack messages and emails so that I could auto-filter everything into one simple list of things to respond to. That is my number one challenge. I think on the localization side, it’s workflow steps, you know, that’s the number one thing I wish AI could help us automate, is a lot of those painful repeated work workflow steps that humans still have to do.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, no. I think that’s right. I’ll say, I mean, currently somebody could invent what you’ve just said about the Slack and email messages aggregator. That’d be amazing. Maybe that’s where AI will ultimately help me out.

Jason Hemingway: Nice mid-show moment, so let’s go back into, you know, scaling and structure and how you do it as a business. But when you are building for scale or have built for scale, you’ve got some foundational elements, you know, you’ve got tech, you’ve got team structures, you’ve got workflow.

Jason Hemingway: What are the foundational elements you think matter most when you are sort of doing that?

Nataly Kelly: I think the number one foundational element is strategy and getting alignment on the strategy before you deal with anything else. Because if you don’t, you may make the wrong investments in technology. You make the wrong investments in workflow and everything else that follows.

Nataly Kelly: And I find often we’re quick to leap into solutions before we have alignment on the strategy. And so that’s my number one. Number one suggestion for anyone is do we have everybody aligned on the strategy, and are we in agreement on what we are trying to accomplish, why we’re trying to accomplish it, and how we will measure it?

Nataly Kelly: Once you’ve got those things clear, it’s easy to figure everything else out.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, I think that’s great advice. You know, strategy is something that takes time, but you need to get it right because it’ll make everything ultimately in the end a lot quicker when you’re executing. If you’ve got the strategy, everyone understands where they’re going, following the same path, rowing in the same direction, pardon that kind of pun there.

Nataly Kelly: That’s right, and I think sometimes Jason, strategy gets a bad rep because it sounds too highfalutin, and it sounds too squishy for some people, you know, especially in smaller companies, we’re like, we don’t have time for strategy, we just need to execute and find out what works. I’m like, okay, well, let’s at least have a hypothesis for an experiment that we will run so that we know how we’re gonna measure the results of that experiment. I find some companies, depending on the stage of growth they’re at, that actually resonates better. Sometimes, if you talk about strategy, people will tune you out.

Nataly Kelly: I know in my mind I’m talking about let’s agree on why we’re doing something and how we’re gonna measure it. And so sometimes just an experiment with a hypothesis is a faster way to get agreement on moving forward as a team.

Nataly Kelly: Well also, I think it’s interesting as you get bigger. You can’t focus on everything, and strategy is often what you don’t do, making you know, choices of where you’re gonna go and where you’re not gonna compete, or what markets you’re going to enter. That’s really important, I think, as you scale, because you can’t just put every, you can’t spend more, put more people in everywhere and just, you know, keep going in all different directions.

Nataly Kelly: You need to have, kind of, a north star. But you’re right that the experimentation is quite an interesting way of kind of getting people behind the ideas. So, let’s move it slightly. So, strategy, if you’ve got strategy right, you’re great. But let’s say you’re in, and you may have had experience with this.

Nataly Kelly: Your early indicators are that your localization or your going global efforts aren’t really resonating locally, even if they appear. What are those kinds of early indicators that can kind of show you that it’s not working, so that those experiments that you might run, you know, you can take corrective action.

Nataly Kelly: I mean, I think the number one piece of KPI feedback, whatever you want, is what the customers are saying.

Nataly Kelly: If you can get direct feedback from your customers, great. If you can’t, the second most important KPI is what your employees on the ground are saying in the local market, or your partners, you know, basically get close to the customer, listen to the customer, and then if you can’t, the next best layer is whoever’s closest to the customer.

Nataly Kelly: So it might be your support reps, it might be your sales reps, it might be your partners on the ground, you know, customer proximity is so important to understand where things are failing and where you can optimize.

Jason Hemingway: And then, do you kind of package that sentiment up, and you know, you’ve gotta present that to make some change to the, I don’t know, it might be the exec minus one team or whoever needs to make some corrective decisions.

Jason Hemingway: Have you had experience of packaging that up and talking to people about that kind of customer sentiment in regions? Is there any advice you’d give to teams to do that?

Nataly Kelly: I think the number one thing that resonates with executives, but also just anyone at the company, is the voice of the customer.

Nataly Kelly: And what I mean by that is literally sharing a quote from the customer that clearly describes their problem. If you have anyone at your company who doesn’t care that a customer’s complaining about something or has a perspective and wants to give you feedback, that’s a problem, you know, so I think if customers are giving you the gift, the benefit of their feedback and their wisdom, it’s on you to listen to that. I like to give both quantitative and qualitative information to make a business case for anything that comes from my background at CSA research, you know, we always looked at things like, okay, what’s the qualitative say, but also what’s the quantitative say?

Nataly Kelly: And the truth is the hybrid of those two things. And so I’ve always applied that. When I looked at that global customer experience data, it was not only what do the numbers say, it was much of the gold was in the actual verbatim of what the customer feedback was. And so I always prioritize reading those carefully, understanding the customer’s perspective, because it sheds a light on the numbers that you cannot otherwise get.

Nataly Kelly: So I really believe in the power of the two combined.

Jason Hemingway: No, and I think you know, I mean any marketers that are listening will know, you know, qual and quant is absolutely the way you do research in general for your markets. So, I think it’s interesting you bring the voice of the customer and that qual and quant, I think the verbatims get the attention, don’t they?

Jason Hemingway: That’s quite an interesting, they do get people’s attention when you hear it in the customer’s own voice, you know, okay, let’s listen to that. It can be good or bad. Of course, it can be good, it can be, you know, things to correct, but it can also give you some highlights of things you’re doing right. So I think it’s good to kind of gather it.

Jason Hemingway: So, let’s move the conversation. Everything we talk about today has to have some kind of AI angle, and we are no exception today. And I just wanted to, you’ve written a lot about the intersection of, you know, localization, translation, AI, and how large language models, etc, are changing the role in global business.

Jason Hemingway: Can you just give us your viewpoint, of how that’s actually shifting at the moment? What do you see?

Nataly Kelly: Well, I think more people are becoming aware that the ability to localize things is not the problem. It used to be that you literally could not localize everything that you wanted to because of the translation step in the process.

Nataly Kelly: Well, now you can actually get the translation work done, but the question is, how good will it be? And also, are you localizing the right things? So I think it’s like a kid in a candy store effect. So if you put the kid loose and they can just grab anything they want, great, but is that gonna be the best experience at the end of the day?

Nataly Kelly: Is that really the thing that will delight them the most? Or is the delight really more in walking up and selecting that one perfect piece of candy that is the kid’s favorite color, and their favorite taste and the favorite thing that they love? That’s gonna be individual, and that’s gonna be dependent on who the customer is.

Nataly Kelly: So I think what we’re realizing with AI is it’s not that because you now have AI, you can suddenly get rid of your localization team or that you can suddenly not pay translators a fair wage. It’s thinking different, it’s forcing people to think differently about how do we use our human localization talent for the best impact and the biggest impact?

Nataly Kelly: So I really think when we think about scaling with AI, we’re realizing, oh, it was never about just getting one word, you know, words in from one language into another. It’s always been about adapting the message, the experience, the product itself. What the value is and how people value it, and so I think AI, by removing some constraints, is highlighting new constraints that I think will force us to be more intentional about how we engage with localization teams.

Jason Hemingway: And there’s an element we talk about a lot. It was about this idea of risk. What kind of risk appetite you have for different types of content? You know, like a legal contract, you don’t want much risk in that at all. So when you are, you know, localizing now or translating it, it’s gotta be very, when you’re doing customer user-generated content, for example, it might be that you’ve got a little bit of a lesser risk profile, which means that you can assess things around quality.

Jason Hemingway: You can send it to the right workflow, whether that’s a machine or a human, that needs to think about it. I also think that this area now, you know, and I wonder what you think, is this area of, yeah, AI can do lots of things. It can add scale, but it needs to have some degree of transparency so that we know what it’s doing and why it’s doing it and what decisions it might be making.

Jason Hemingway: So that’s an interesting area that, kind of, I look at, you know, as I decide a bit. Well, how is it making those decisions, and how can we be confident that it’s doing it for the right reasons?

Nataly Kelly: Jason, I had that exact challenge at HubSpot because we had so much content in our knowledge base that, you know sure, we could have localized all of it with machine translation at the time.

Nataly Kelly: The challenge was not all of it was equally important, and not all of it was equally important to each market. So, for example, there might be questions on there about data privacy features in the product. It’s gonna matter a lot more to the German market than it does to Americans. We might’ve had certain things that were only relevant to the Japanese market.

Nataly Kelly: Maybe that content didn’t need to really be great in French, but it needed to be absolutely perfect in Japanese. So we actually had a process of looking at how important is this particular knowledge base article for a given market. But also in general, how many views is it getting, and how many users will it affect?

Nataly Kelly: That enable us to tier and say, oh, there were some pieces of knowledge-based articles that I had to have a human review for sure. If not fully translate and adapt themselves. So my in-house linguists would do certain knowledge-based articles 100% internally. Others, we could outsource safely to an LSP.

Nataly Kelly: Others could be 100% machine-translated or AI-translated today. But the choices of when to use which thing were very specific and had to be made by a human.

Jason Hemingway: Do you see that role of the human or different role, let’s not say the human, that sounds weird, but let’s say the role of, or the structure of localizations teams changing in a sense to accommodate more of how you build?

Jason Hemingway: So, just give me a couple of thoughts on that, if you will, or the audience, a couple of thoughts on that.

Nataly Kelly: Absolutely. I think with AI, being able to handle more of, you know, more steps of the process, like conversion of content into different languages, but also workflow automation, you know, some of those process steps.

Nataly Kelly: I think that the human value will be more of a content strategist. Where are we going to apply which workflow to which types of content? And I think localization project managers already do a lot of that. I think the role of the linguists, the linguistic talent, will be more of really ensuring that it’s adapted culturally for appropriate use and resonance in the local market. And so I think that’s going to get us away from a price-for-word model and move us more toward an hourly retainer type model for linguists. I think that’s gonna move project managers away from how do I get the work done to, should I even do the work?

Nataly Kelly: And if so, what’s the best way to do it for maximum impact? So I think the rules will continue to evolve now that we’ve remove some constraints in terms of how expensive and slow things were in the past. But that’s going to mean humans add different value, I would say even higher value than we did in the past in localization processes.

Jason Hemingway: And you tie that value, if you tie that value all the way back to what we said at the beginning, you tie that value to meeting the needs of the business as they grow globally. Actually, the future’s quite bright when you think of it like that. I think it’s a reason to be really optimistic and positive for teams looking at, you know, multilingual content.

Jason Hemingway: I think so too because the world is only getting more interconnected, not less. That means that the value of localization professionals will only increase because people want to be closer together. They want to build relationships across borders. They want to enable their product to be accessed in another country, in another culture; that need is not going away.

Nataly Kelly: So I don’t see the need for localization knowledge or localization professionals to go away. I think it’s going to evolve and continue to bring the world closer together in a more interconnected way than ever, because people are fooled into thinking AI can do that alone.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I love it. Well, look, I mean, that’s the end of the large-scale questions, Nataly. Fantastic. We’ve just got a couple of quick-fire questions to see us out, but thank you for a fascinating conversation. It’s really great to catch up with you. I know you’re very, very busy in the CMO role and also with the, you know, promoting the book. So, just a couple of questions before we go.

Jason Hemingway: If you could describe in one word global growth, what would it be? Interconnectedness. I thought you might say connectedness or something like that. Interconnectedness. Great. Yeah. Given what we talked about. I love it. I love it. Right. And then just lastly, and you’re not allowed to name your own book or your own newsletter, although you can, you do have those, and people are very welcome to, again, check them out.

Jason Hemingway: What is the book, or podcast, or newsletter that you are loving right now that you’re listening to, reading, or you know?

Nataly Kelly: I actually am loving a book. I have a lot of books on my shelf right next to me right now but there is a book by Richard Shotton. Oh

Jason Hemingway: yeah. Yep.

Nataly Kelly: Hacking the Human Mind. That’s the name of the book.

Nataly Kelly: Hacking the Human Mind is the new one. I just started reading it over the weekend, and I’m loving it so far. So I would highly recommend that.

Jason Hemingway: Behavioral economics, all that kind of thing. Behavioral, right. Yeah. Yeah. Behavioral

Nataly Kelly: science? Science.

Jason Hemingway: That’s it. But,

Nataly Kelly: how to influence human behavior, and it’s just a book that you won’t be able to put down.

Nataly Kelly: Yeah, I love it. It’s applicable to anyone in marketing or localization, so I really love that book. And he’s a great speaker, a great author, a great thinker. So he’s fantastic, I recommend.

Jason Hemingway: Absolutely. Yeah, I seem to remember things like Nudge theory and all of that. He talks about it, it’s very interesting.

Jason Hemingway: So, yeah. Brilliant. Thank you for that. So, thank you Nataly for joining us. That was a fantastic conversation, and you know, from somebody who’s worked in, you know, the localization industry and actually, you know, gone through all of that, your knowledge is tremendous, and it was a fascinating conversation.

Jason Hemingway: And really great to hear somebody making that case that, you know, helping to make that case from a position of, you know, the CMO of a multinational business about how localization can be seen to be driving the business forward, and thinking about the future growth of business rather than just being that service center.

Jason Hemingway: So Nataly, thank you. I hope to have you again on the podcast at some point in the future. But for now, thanks very much for coming, and I hope you enjoyed it.

Nataly Kelly: Thank you so much, Jason. Lovely to be with you today.

Jason Hemingway: Well, that’s it for another episode of In other words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a massive thank you to Nataly Kelly for joining us, making a powerful case on why localization deserves a permanent seat in the boardroom.

Jason Hemingway: If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to In other words on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. You could also find more conversations on leadership growth and what it takes to really scale globally At Phrase.com. Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see you next time.