[00:00:00] Nataly: I view my RevOps partner and my marketing ops partner as a CMO as. The most important member of my team, even if they're not on my team, they're like my ally. And so I really view that relationship as super critical. And if I have to pick one person who's going to like be with me by my side in every meeting, they are the one. And that's how, that's the model that I got at HubSpot. [00:00:23] Phil: What's up everyone. And today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Natalie Kelly, CMO at Zappy. [00:00:56] About Nataly --- [00:00:56] Phil: Natalie started her career as an interpreter at AT& T and [00:01:00] later co founded a research and consulting company, which was Acqui hired by her biggest customer. Where she would serve as director of product development, and she later held chief research officer and VP of market development titles at a market research firm, and later a translation and localization company, Natalie then made the mega move to HubSpot as VP of marketing, where she would spend nearly eight years involved in all aspects of full funnel marketing globally, including international ops localization. [00:01:29] She then moved over to rebranding as chief growth officer, leading sales, marketing, and. Product, uh, Natalie's also an author. She's published three books and one coming out next year. She has a newsletter called making global work. And today Natalie's moved into her fourth SAS marketing leadership role as CMO at Zappy, the leading consumer insights platform, Natalie. [00:01:48] Thanks so much for your time today. Super pumped to chat. [00:01:51] Nataly: Same here. Thank you for having me, Phil. It's lovely. [00:01:54] ​ [00:01:54] Phil: [00:02:00] [00:03:00] I'm a big fan of your newsletter and in prep for this episode, uh, definitely gone back and read a bunch of your different issues, love the writing style. And I think that like, this will be interesting because a lot of the topics you cover have a ton of overlap with marketing operations, right? [00:03:55] Why LinkedIn Works for Building a Newsletter --- [00:03:55] Phil: But I want to start by asking you why LinkedIn as the platform [00:04:00] for your newsletter, um, you know, LinkedIn over owning your own audience, I guess, like through email, like the, the big risk folks talk a lot about is, you know, what if like the own platform, like LinkedIn shifts, it's focused to say video or text based newsletters could suddenly like see their reach drop since you don't really like control the algorithm on these like platforms, you don't have direct access to that audience. [00:04:23] Did it feel a bit risky for you? Like Rand Fishkin recently said on, on LinkedIn, we were just chatting about He said, I'd rather have a hundred emails. Than 1 million TikTok followers. Would love to hear your thoughts there. [00:04:36] Nataly: Yeah, that's he, those are wise words. You know, I don't disagree with him. I think it all depends on your goal. You know, my goal was I chose LinkedIn for my personal newsletter because my primary initial goal was simply reach and audience growth. And, you know, you mentioned the risk about, you know, what if they do this? [00:04:53] What if they do that? I don't really. I don't have many fears about that type of thing because I tend to [00:05:00] feel like I'm going to be adaptable enough to evolve with the platform in terms of the content format. Now, if I suddenly have to be on camera doing videos every single day, then I might change my mind. [00:05:10] You know, what I do like about LinkedIn is it's text based. You know, I'm a writer. I love to write. I also noticed that some LinkedIn posts, you know, newsletters that I've written, they get long tail keywords, you know, they're indexed. And so I don't think they'll move completely away from text. Well, we'll see. [00:05:26] I mean, there's lots of other factors, but I think, you know, it's, it's an interesting platform. What I love about it is most of the topics that I wanted to talk about and the audience that I wanted to reach. You know, I had a decent amount of followers and, you know, I find the platform itself is naturally growing and my audience will naturally grow along with it. [00:05:48] So, you know, this is advice that I often give to people in their career or in general, follow the growth, you know, as a marketer, when you see a channel and you see traction. That's one thing I learned at HubSpot, [00:06:00] like go deep and go hard into that channel and like really get the most out of it. If you see momentum there and it's kind of similar in your career, you know, you see a fast growing company, fast growing area of business, you'll follow that growth. [00:06:12] And I feel like. LinkedIn, I was already seeing a lot of follower growth. How can I take advantage of that and do more with it? The other thing that I love is with LinkedIn, you get a triple play. So as marketers getting harder and harder to break through the noise. And if you can have kind of a multi channel or multi touch point play where you have to do less work, you know, I'm all about that. [00:06:36] So with LinkedIn, you get your newsletter appearing in a feed. Uh, the people who subscribe also get a notification and they get an email. So they get a notification on the platform and an email. So I, when I noticed this, when I started to subscribe to some of the early newsletters, my thought was, Oh, it's a triple play. [00:06:54] You know, you basically get hit three times. So you're more likely to actually look at it and open it and read the content. [00:07:00] Maybe click through to the next, you know, thing, whatever's being promoted. I don't, you know, I'm not worried about conversions. You know, I really just want reach. And so. I think it's very aligned with my goal and thinking as a marketer, you know, that's the tactic that I want to use for that specific goal at this point in time. [00:07:16] Now, someday will I add an email newsletter or some other type of newsletter, a sub stack? I looked into all of those, but. It didn't feel like that was the right one for me. I wanted to also just make it easy. Like, where do I go regularly that I can create content, engage with people. LinkedIn is where it's at for me. [00:07:33] So I'm also just too busy to set up separate email campaigns. I'm writing for fun. I like to help people, you know, I'm investing my time accordingly. [00:07:42] Phil: That's really cool. I, I didn't actually know that the LinkedIn did the email notification on top of that. That's, that's really cool. 'cause Yeah, to your point, I, I went the own route, um, using customer io for the email platform. Uh, but you know, if I do want to get a notification out on social. I'm doing a [00:08:00] post on LinkedIn and I'm doing a post on Instagram and then I'm also doing the email and customer IO. [00:08:05] So yeah, it is a bit more work for sure. But, uh, I guess like I'm a bit more focused on, on the conversion side, like a lot of the sponsors on the show care about the audience numbers, but also. How many people are on the email list of people that you actually own? Because I don't know who listens to the show on like Apple or Spotify can't see emails there. [00:08:24] So you make good points though. It's a, it's really interesting debate. [00:08:29] Nataly: For sure. [00:08:29] Phil: So the newsletter is called, uh, making global work. And I feel like [00:08:34] Understanding the Nuances of Going Global --- [00:08:34] Phil: maybe we can start by unpacking what is. Globalization mean for you? Like, I think there's some misconceptions about the concept of going global and marketing. Like in school, uh, way, way back when globalization and like international marketing was a huge topic. [00:08:49] It was even its own bachelor, uh, specialization in, in my, uh, in my university, uh, technically as soon as like you're online, you're kind of global, right? Like you're opening it up to the [00:09:00] world. Maybe not like, we'd love you to unpack that for us. Okay. [00:09:05] Nataly: a big topic. Uh, so there's going global and then there's going local and I think going local is far more intentional in nature than going global when you're talking about like launching a website. Yes. Technically you are able to reach a global audience the minute that you have a global website. [00:09:25] But you could say that's true. The minute you go on Tik TOK, the minute you have a LinkedIn profile, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to attract. a local audience of a specific country, a specific language. And so, you know, I think it's all about the intention and, you know, how you want to use that website to reach A specific community of people and a specific audience. [00:09:50] So on the question of globalization and what it means, wow, this is a tough one because I actually taught in a master's degree program and [00:10:00] localization at the Middlebury Institute. So it's not only a bachelor's specialization, actually a lot of people out there who run large localization and globalization programs for companies like Adobe and Salesforce and NetApp and HubSpot where I worked. [00:10:14] Uh, so. If I had to break it down and try to explain in simple terms, what I did at HubSpot to try to communicate what this was to the entire company was I came up with one word definitions. So, you know, as marketers, we like to simplify the message so that it's memorable and repeatable. Well, that's what I tried to do internally at HubSpot. [00:10:35] And so. I noticed people were using these terms kind of interchangeably, but in this whole domain of globalization, how experts, domain experts, subject matter experts think about it is when you talk about internationalization, you're usually talking about adapting the code. So in my one word definitions, it was like, what do we adapt code when it's talking about [00:11:00] internationalization? [00:11:00] It's usually the technical side, adapting code for a website or for software that usually relates. To adapting code. When you're talking about internationalization, when you're talking about translation, a lot of people think it's swapping out words from one language to another, but that's not what translation is about. [00:11:16] Translation is about adapting the message. And so you're not succeeding if you're just swapping words out, as we all know, because we've seen bad translations. [00:11:26] Phil: Yeah. [00:11:26] Nataly: You're adapting the message and sometimes the words you use. For one culture will be completely different from the words that you would use in another to evoke the same response. [00:11:36] And then with localization, you're adapting an experience. So it's more complex than, you know, just the code alone or just the message. It's the entire experience. So what do they see? Where do they click? What happens when they move from this page to this page on a website? Or what happens when they open up this navigation menu and move here? [00:11:56] It's about adapting that entire User [00:12:00] experience in a digital setting, usually. And then with globalization, it's about adapting the entire framework, the entire mindset. That's actually the trickiest one that people have a hard time understanding because sometimes things are built with one local market in mind. [00:12:17] And then when you go to try to adapt them, you actually can't. For example, a lot of websites and experiences are built thinking, Oh, one country equals one language. So if I'm an American and I only speak English, maybe I'm thinking, Oh, I'll just build the website in a way that if I want to swap out the language, I'll do it. [00:12:37] For this country, I can, but you know, being Canadian, that doesn't always work and that you might have people who speak more than one language in the same country, or you might have people who speak a language and move from country to country or cross borders or gets really complicated in Europe or in India where there's many, many languages. [00:12:55] So, you know, this is the type of thing that I think is tricky is getting people [00:13:00] to understand how to build things from the start with a mindset that's global to begin with. Versus rooted in their local reality. [00:13:08] Phil: Very cool. Love the breakdown there. I totally, uh, like related when you said like the, the translation part, it's a lot more than just words because a lot of companies do this very poorly. Um, like you said, I'm based in Canada. I'm in Ontario and my first language is actually French. So my wife and I will always look at like product translations. [00:13:29] Cause most products in Ontario have to have the French and the English, and you can just tell that like, These companies didn't invest too much in translating the message. The word is just completely off. Uh, I'm trying to think of one that comes to mind recently, but wouldn't make sense anyways. Cause most people don't, don't listen to the podcast in French, but yeah. [00:13:49] Nataly: Well, there's all kinds of these. So I, there was, I can't even remember the car manufacturer that went into another country, but that when they went into, sorry, when they went into France, [00:14:00] the, the model number for the car was M R D no, sorry, M R. Which in French is de, and so when you put M, R, de together, you know, it's like, it, it looks like a, a swear word. [00:14:16] Phil: Uh, right. [00:14:18] Nataly: So when people would read it, they were like, ah, but you would never know that unless you're a French speaker. So the people thought like, Oh, we're just picking letters and numbers. How dangerous can that be? But like, I can tell you, certain numbers you can't use in Japan because they, they have the same, they're a homonym with death. [00:14:35] And like, you don't use those. You have an alternate number and you avoid using certain numbers, kind of like 666 and 13. You know, there are equivalent numbers in every culture, but we wouldn't go and book flight 666 and sit and, you know, seat number 13, a lot of companies, you know, name their products. [00:14:53] Even apple made this mistake, you know, with iPhone, you know, like there's, there's lots of companies that do [00:15:00] this and it's, it's about the message that you're sending, not just the translation. And sometimes it's not even a word, it's a number or a letter. [00:15:09] Strategic Timing for Going Global --- [00:15:09] Phil: Do you think that some companies think they should be going global way before they're ready to actually go global? Like how did you think about this in the early days at HubSpot? Like in that first year where you joined where there was probably less than what, like a hundred ish people like walk us through that. [00:15:28] Nataly: Yeah. So interestingly, Brian Halligan was very, very intentional about this. He actually wrote an article for Harvard business review about why we didn't go deep on international earlier, because he was very intentional about strategy. And a big part of his kind of mantra that he taught all of us was a big part of strategies, knowing when to say no to things. [00:15:53] And so we often had something at HubSpot called omissions. Every year as part of our strategic planning process, we [00:16:00] would state the omissions. Here are the things we're not going to do So that everybody knows we've considered it. We're just choosing not to do it so we could get everybody aligned on Hey, we're not doing these things. [00:16:10] Please don't bring them up every Friday. We're not doing them all year So similar to that with international it was very intentional When HubSpot decided to really invest in going global in a big way, and that's actually when I was hired, because I was part of that intentional strategy to invest a lot more in localization and new markets and languages, I would say the only the caveat I would give is, um, A lot of companies don't have that strategic planning muscle and they might not be thinking that way, especially when you're a startup and you're scrappy and you're kind of, Oh, let's take on the world. [00:16:51] You know, a lot of companies do make that mistake and that's why you've noticed some of those products with the bad French translations because they think it will be easier than it is. And they [00:17:00] under invest. And so they're like, well, let's just get somebody who speaks French. And like that person has another job. [00:17:04] They're not a professional translator. And they just like type out something, even if they spoke French, they might've just looked it up online or in a dictionary and don't really know. And they also might not have the context of what the product even is or how much space they have on the package or, you know, there's so many issues related to that, but I think the number one thing I would say about this is. [00:17:24] So many companies go global before they really should, and they start to like experiment with local. You don't want to do that. You want to be intentional about it. You want to make sure that when you do it, you're committed to really delivering a good experience. Otherwise you make a mistake with your brand. [00:17:42] People have a bad experience. They won't buy your product again, and they might never take a second look at you. So first impressions matter in new local markets. You know, it's like, would you go out into a new market or even when you're starting your, your business, would you do that with a logo that like, ah, who [00:18:00] cares, you care about your brand. [00:18:03] So why would you be different, you know, treated differently. You know, in a new market, [00:18:07] Phil: Hmm. Yeah. So many great points there. [00:18:09] Elevating RevOps to a Strategic Partner --- [00:18:09] Phil: I love the point about the emissions and how that's like a big part of strategy saying notice stuff. I feel like that's maybe it should be a cornerstone of marketing operations and like rev ops professionals, right? Like in a lot of companies, they're like this service organization and just like a ticket center and they don't. [00:18:26] Get to say no to stuff as much as like they should. And oftentimes other departments are deciding what they should be doing, as opposed to them coming up with emissions at the start of the year. We are not doing globalization this year. We are just a three person marketing operations team. We're not tackling that right now. [00:18:46] It's actually one of the common Themes that we try to disseminate on, on the podcast that like mobs and rev ops should be a strategic function. We should be like strategy counterparts to the business, not a service org. Like, do you [00:19:00] think that that's the case in a lot of companies still? And how were you able to break this narrative in your career? [00:19:06] Okay. Right. [00:19:12] Nataly: I would say the right hand person to the CEO is the head of RebOps. And she is a highly, highly strategic thinker and a very important person who works very closely with the CEO at HubSpot. There was always a, Uh, a view on rev ops and marketing ops and sales ops and customer success ops and all that, that it's strategy as well as operations. [00:19:36] In fact, my title for many years was international operations and strategy. And we kind of combined those roles, usually no matter where it sat at HubSpot to your point, and I've seen this at various companies, if rev ops isn't strategic and aligned with strategy and helping support that strategy, It really goes wrong very quickly. [00:19:58] And it's this, you [00:20:00] know, tragedy of the commons where basically it's a common resource and like, I want this report. I want that report. Give me that report. Give me this segment, give me this cut of the data. And then nobody knows how the data is even supposed to be used. And also because it ends, you end up with this. [00:20:17] It's just hodgepodge of stuff that was built by all these different people who've come and gone over the years and nobody can even interpret it. Then it's just a lot of wasted work. And why not just make it more strategic from the start? So, you know, I think we had a very big head start on this at HubSpot because when you're Marketing software, sales software, customers, you know, you think that way. [00:20:39] And so we use our product. We're like power users of our product. Cause our product was mostly for mid market SMB and we're like a giant using our own products. So we really don't push it to the limits. Uh, so I think, you know, I was lucky to be exposed to that because it's a common challenge for many companies. [00:20:57] And it's one that I'm passionate about because I view [00:21:00] my RevOps partner and my marketing ops partner as a CMO as. The most important member of my team, even if they're not on my team, they're like my ally. And so I really view that relationship as super critical. And if I have to pick one person who's going to like be with me by my side in every meeting, they are the one. [00:21:22] And that's how, that's the model that I got at HubSpot. Yeah. [00:21:28] Phil: and we're all kind of stretched in and typically, you know, of all the things we have on our, on our plate in the early days, typically localization and translation isn't really like a focus area in, in the early days, at least like we're doing English and that's that. [00:21:43] And This is obviously a huge area of opportunity for larger companies when it no longer becomes an emission for, for this strategy. [00:21:51] Challenges in Scaling Global Localization at HubSpot --- [00:21:51] Phil: And I know that while you were at HubSpot, there were a ton of challenges that you had to solve, uh, like on the MarTech side, on the revenue [00:22:00] operation side, when you were like trying to go global or about to go global. [00:22:03] Um, a lot of folks understand the hurdles with like translation. Like we just talked about, like not just words, but also the message and some of the obstacles with localization, but maybe unpack. That journey for us at HubsFox. I know it was a big part of your journey there. [00:22:19] Nataly: Well, I do want to say I love startups and I advise quite a few, and one of them that I advised. It was highly global from day one. And I have some stories about that in my book. Uh, my prior book is called take your company global. And I intentionally featured some of them because I do want to give startups and founders hope, because I think it's something really beautiful when you can succeed in another language, in another country, where maybe there's a competitive opening in the market or a sweet spot, or. [00:22:48] Something that, you know, can enrich people's lives, both the founders and the people in the market that they're selling into. So I don't want to make it sound like companies that are smaller can't [00:23:00] go local because they absolutely can. And I've seen many that have built really great businesses doing that. [00:23:06] And I love helping them do that. But as for HubSpot, um, I think our biggest challenge in going global was when you're in a B2B software environment. You and a Martech, you know, solution, like what we were providing, um, there's a lot of content to localize and there's a lot of systems and websites and online community and an app partner ecosystem and, and, and, and, and, and, so, you know, my biggest challenge in leading localization there was, you know, How do we create a strategy that will meet the needs of our teams in those local markets who have targets, you know, revenue targets to hit while making sure that I help the rest of the company think about them for later. [00:23:58] So even if we could [00:24:00] identify, like, what's the content, what's the stuff that they need to get, you know, to hit their goals today, how do I also make sure that what people are creating over in this other area of the company, is even going to be localizable in a year or two or three, because if you don't think about global early on several years later, when you need to, it can actually derail your efforts because you've, you know, you talk about tech debt, it's globalization debt. [00:24:29] And that is, there's definitely every company has this. And. You know, I can tell you there's lots of examples, like when we needed to localize our academy, you know, academy, HubSpot Academy is lots of video content. That's very expensive to localize. You know, if you want to do video content at scale in lots of languages, you know, you might even need to hire different talent to record the videos from scratch because it's going to take you so much money and time to like get the timestamps, do the captions, do, you know, all these little things, [00:25:00] and then to pick it apart, get the translations to match on the screen. [00:25:03] Like it's. A nightmare of a lot of work and my team did all of that, you know, with the academy team, but that's just one example because HubSpot, you've got partner community, you've got academy content, you've got an online community, you've got a partner program, you've got all these marketers who are creating tons of content. [00:25:20] You've got an inbound marketing strategy that depends on blogging and SEO and how do you localize all the keywords and how do you just, how do you decide? You know, which knowledge based articles are going to be localized. And if you're at a continuous deployment, you know, company CICD, where they're shipping code thousands of times a day, how do you keep pace with not only all the product changes that have to be live in 20 languages around the clock? [00:25:46] How do you then update the knowledge based articles, update all the videos associated, update all the Academy content, because those all have to be updated. It is really, really tough to do. Agile localization on [00:26:00] steroids and that's what we did. And the other part I would say that's difficult at a place like HubSpot is we were not just selling a product. [00:26:08] We were selling careers. We're trying to help people succeed in their careers with a lot of helpful content. We're also selling a philosophy when you're just selling inbound marketing, you have to explain a new philosophy to people. When you take that into another country, like say Japan, where inbound marketing means marketing to Chinese tourists, you might run into things that are surprising along the way. [00:26:31] So I didn't. Had a lot of like, really interesting experiences running international operations, launching new offices in other countries with HubSpot, running that whole localization machine. It was a lot of fun times, but also a lot of hard work. [00:26:48] Phil: no kidding. I feel like if a listener right now is like on the verge or contemplating globalizing in like three or four countries in the next year or so, and they [00:27:00] just listened to that, they're probably just like, yeah, let's add this to the emissions list for, for another year, [00:27:07] Nataly: Well, you know, I, I do want to give people hope because if you're smart about selecting which countries you target and how you target them. It doesn't have to be that complicated. You know, you can do things through different channels, you know, so one option is get a reseller channel. They might localize everything for you. [00:27:27] You know, there's lots of strategies that you can use. [00:27:30] ​ [00:27:30] [00:28:00] [00:29:00] [00:29:11] Choosing the Right Approach to Global Expansion --- [00:29:11] Phil: would you recommend like, since they're going down this route to. Just pick a country or two or three, like how many countries is like the right approach? I know it probably like depends a lot on like the company or whatever, but Is it wiser to just like pick one new market to localize in? Or if you're going through that effort, you might as well pick a few other ones. [00:29:34] Like what's the typical advice there? [00:29:37] Nataly: Yeah, I'm going to be like the consultant answer [00:29:41] here and say, it depends. So there are types of businesses that you can take global from day one. So for example, I mentioned I advise some companies. One of them is a small Irish toy manufacturer called Lottie dolls. Now, Lottie dolls, imagine like, Barbie, but smaller [00:30:00] dolls that are child shaped bodies, diverse, inclusive, STEM focused, you know, roles, careers, reflected. [00:30:09] They're one of the companies that I advise. Now when they went, when they looked at the market for toys, doesn't grow very much because kids age out every single year. So they don't have a fast growing underlying market, you know, wave that they can attach to. So they knew, okay, if we want to hit this revenue goal, we're going to have to target this many markets from day one, because we can only capture this percentage of the toy market for, you know, mostly girls this age, although they also do boy dolls and try to be gender inclusive. [00:30:40] So. That was a really interesting experience. And I wrote about that in my prior book because they mostly went global through Amazon because Amazon's already in a lot of markets. And so they could actually reach a global audience. And then the only thing they had to think about really was. [00:31:00] How do we make sure that our product is actually global friendly and that we have descriptions in the different languages and that we are meeting the manufacturing standards and all these different countries where it will be sold, but their challenge was more around that piece than it was around localizing a bunch of content because their website's fairly simple, you know, they don't have to localize everything. [00:31:23] And they can basically just have relationships with local retailers and expand that way. It's very different. Um, I would also say there are some companies where You can just pick like a neighboring country. And I often advise, funnily, we talked about Canada, so many American companies just overlook Canada and don't even think that Canada is another country where they could actually really serve a market that's right next door. [00:31:49] Like they think, Oh, let's go to China. Like, really? It's a good, not far away. Like, can you just look up, you know? Um, so I find Canada to be the most overlooked or [00:32:00] under looked or under you know, exploited opportunity for most American businesses because they're like, let's go to Europe. I'm like, why can't we stay in the same time zone? [00:32:09] Like, let's just kind of stay like a little, not local, but proximate, you know? So that's one of my little pet peeves. Um, but I do find you can pick one market at a time. And I guess my, my big advice would be start small. You don't even have to, Go into another language, like maybe start with a country that speaks the same language, or maybe if you want to get a foothold in Canada, then start with French. [00:32:35] So you get some experience under your belt in localizing into another language before you go to France, you know, [00:32:42] Phil: Yeah. We can get into a whole other debate about like the, the, the French version of Canada versus the French version. That's. Specific to the province of Quebec versus the French in Europe. Like it's all different slices of it. And little words can mean something completely different, even [00:33:00] though it's technically still the same language. [00:33:02] Nataly: Oh, for sure. Well, that's actually interesting. You say that because [00:33:05] Implementing a Universal Language Strategy --- [00:33:05] Nataly: at HubSpot, we decided to do. What's called a language strategy. So if you go to HubSpot's website, you'll notice it's in French, but it's Universal French, uh, which isn't local French, you know? So when you've got to localize that much content, you have to make choices. [00:33:25] And so what we did for Spanish, which is language I speak, we decided to do what's called universal Spanish, which I think is hilarious because only spoken on earth, but we did choose universal Spanish, which is mostly Latin American Spanish, but also you. What that means is you basically try to avoid words that are known to be different in each region. [00:33:50] So you try to, you know, standardize on the terms that everybody will understand in that language. It's not always possible, but you try to kind of avoid the ones that are like hyper regional. [00:34:00] And so, you know, there are words in French Canada that, you know, Canadian French that we just wouldn't be able to use. [00:34:06] On the French website, because we know like, oh, that's actually not a good word to use, you know, so that, that makes it much harder, but it's also more scalable across more markets that speak the same language. And that was an intentional strategy that we used. [00:34:20] Mastering Budget Management in Localization --- [00:34:20] Phil: like as you're talking about all the different content, localization, translation pieces that you guys dealt with at HubSpot, like one of the first things I thought of from like the obstacles standpoint was The budget, like how do you manage not just like the team that you have managing this stuff, but if you're outsourcing pieces of this and you have to keep tabs with the product change logs, like you said, and then video is like a whole other ball game also. [00:34:50] So like you've actually written about this, that like localization managers are incredibly skilled at managing budgets. And one lesson about managing costs with precision that [00:35:00] localization managers. Could teach the rest of the organization. Curious your, your thoughts behind that one. [00:35:07] Nataly: Yeah. So localization managers are very adept at managing highly complex budgets. It's a big part of the job. So, you know, I would say both upward and downward. So at HubSpot, for example, we had to manage all of the localization budget for the entire company. So product had some parts of it. Marketing had obviously a huge amount of it, but there were parts like legal because there's. [00:35:33] You know, legal documents, terms of service, sales contracts, all those things had to be not only localized, but customizable by the sales rep in all of the languages that we sold into. So that's like a whole nother, you know, and same thing for like our app partner program. If we wanted somebody to sign up to be an app partner, the listing flow, all of the elements of it, the forms that people fill out, the notifications, they get everything else to be localized. [00:35:59] [00:36:00] So, you know, that's really tricky, but what it means from a budgeting perspective is that you have to be able to manage a very large and complex budget for multiple stakeholders, but also because it relies on outsourcing heavily because you can never just get it. You can never cover all the languages internally for all the needs that you'll have, especially because translators usually are very specialized in what they're good at. [00:36:27] So like myself, when I was, you know, I was an interpreter back in the day for Spanish. But I was also a court certified interpreter. So legal was something I was okay with, but if you'd asked me to translate like certain business terminology back then, in fact, it's still a running joke because I managed the Latin American team and I had to give a presentation in Spanish once. [00:36:46] And I was like using this outdated term for the word marketing. Cause like what I learned when I went to college in Ecuador, I had a class and it was called Mercado Tecnia, but everybody apparently now says marketing. [00:37:00] So I was using the old term and people made fun of me because like here I am, supposedly bilingual, you know, and I use this like weird old term because I just didn't know because I wasn't actively using that terminology every day. [00:37:14] So my point is back to budget. That a localization manager has to know, okay, I can get this type of translation from this resource for Japanese. Oh, this vendor is good at this type of translation for this. It's very hard to get a one stop shop for all of them without overpaying. And because I was very budget conscious at a fast growing scrappy, you know, company, I made sure that we did everything we could with the budget. [00:37:41] And we did use machine translation where we could. You know, where it made sense and where it wasn't going to result in some horrible translation. [00:37:51] Why LLMs Can't Replace Human Translators --- [00:37:51] Phil: I feel like machine translation has come a long way, especially in the last couple of years with, with LLMs, but still like, uh, being a [00:38:00] multilingual I, I play with it around, like I, at home, it's French, French first all the time, but at work I've never used French professionally. And so I found through the years that I've actually like lost some of my French when I speak to like my wife's parents, sometimes like I'm just like struggling and I'm using wrong words and I'm just like English first all the time. [00:38:21] So I will often just like throw an English thing in Chachi Petit and I'll ask it to spit out like French translations. And I feel like it's gotten a lot better than like Google translate. Translate back in the day, but it's still like, not quite there. There's always a few words here and there. They're just like normal people don't say that word. [00:38:39] Like might be the perfect actual translation, but like normal human speak. That's, that's not the right word for that [00:38:46] Nataly: Oh, well, and good luck to these large language models keeping up with the pace of human evolution because that's language evolves just like humans evolve. Trends evolve. You know, there are all kinds of memes and things that are just current [00:39:00] for a moment in our life and then they go away. And then, but the translator might have to translate that on the fly because it's like part of a marketing campaign or it's part of something. [00:39:09] And so on my team at HubSpot, we often talked about like proximity to the home culture, because that's something that if you're recruiting people who are in localization, they are naturally going to be bicultural. But like myself. I lived in Ecuador for many years. I went to college there, but I haven't been there in a long time and lived there in a long time. [00:39:29] So while I might go back, everything has changed. And so, but if I trade off my time and I spend that in the U S I'm getting closer to the U S market, which I also need to understand as a translator. So this, this sort of like bicultural bilingual nature to that type of person is really hard. To not only recruit for, but then to maintain that proximity with both cultures, because you have to understand both what they wanted to say and how it's going to be received, and you have to be able to negotiate between the two. [00:39:59] So it's, [00:40:00] I think it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. [00:40:02] Phil: Yeah, no kidding. It is definitely an area that I wasn't super familiar with, but I think that like brand is probably one area that it gets very close to your heart and a lot of localization managers, because [00:40:16] Building the Case for Brand Investment --- [00:40:16] Phil: brand doesn't just help like localization. Everything is easier when you have a solid brand. Um, and I've had the chance to chat about brand with, uh, a lot of recent guests this year and how marketing can't simply be reduced to just like Pipeline number, because what we do is way more long term as a CMO. [00:40:35] Like, how do you make the case with your senior management peers or the board or whoever that like, we're going to invest in brand this year. It's not an emission anymore. It'll be impossible to accurately measure everything. We won't see results right away, but it'll help us in the long term when we do localization, when we do X, Y, and Z, like, how do you make the case for brand nowadays? [00:40:57] Nataly: Haha. So it's very interesting [00:41:00] because I am seeing tons of my friends. I have a lot of friends from HubSpot who've gone on to, you know, lead marketing and other companies, and they're fighting this fight every day because they know that brand actually matters, but for a long time, there was enough opportunity in channels where you didn't have to focus as much on brand. [00:41:19] And also in MarTech in particular, there were enough opportunities in white space. That you didn't have to be super differentiated because you were maybe differentiating on the product itself. So your brand didn't have to be super distinctive. Now I am working at Zappy, which is a tech company. It's a consumer insights platform, but our customers are mostly B2C CMOs and marketers and people who work at brand managers and stuff. [00:41:48] So they get brand. They live and breathe brand, you know, so I don't have at Zappi to convince anyone that brand matters because they all know it matters. In [00:42:00] fact, when I arrived at Zappi, our brand team was doing a fantastic job. We have a distinctive brand. People always comment on how amazing it is and I get asked by a lot of people like, which agency do you use? [00:42:12] And I'm like, yeah, It's my in house team. We don't use an agency for that. That's all of them. They did that video. They did that, you know, book cover. They did that ad in Times Square. You know, like we are doing a lot of cool stuff from the brand side. I don't have to do that, but the other parts of the flywheel or the classic marketing funnel, but at HubSpot, we always called it a flywheel. [00:42:33] Um, and I believe it is a flywheel. I. Like to, instead of focusing on like this versus that, I like to focus on my marketing investment portfolio and the way I think about it is. How much am I investing in brand versus demand versus land and expand? And I think a lot of times it gets reduced to like just brand or demand. [00:42:55] And actually we have to think about land and expand because especially in a SaaS business [00:43:00] or, you know, software business. It's not just about landing them. It's about renewing them and making sure they advocate for you and become really strong customer advocates because that fuels the brand, which fuels the demand, which fuels the land and expand motion. [00:43:13] So what I actually do when I'm budgeting, which I'm doing right now, heading into 2025 is I look at the percentage of investments. Transcripts that are meant to drive brand velocity in the flywheel over to demand, you know, and so I can capture them in my, you know, demand funnel, and then, you know, convert them at every stage as we know how to do, and then push them over to expansion motions, which With everything happening, you know, post pandemic and a lot of companies seeing a lot of their revenue being driven through expansion, that's an important part of that, you know, funnel flipped, you know, and connected as a flywheel. [00:43:55] I actually love using that model because the other thing that it allows me. [00:44:00] To show is the interconnectedness between brand and demand and between land and expand and brand. And so that way I can show like, oh my content team, I know they're sitting on this team, but actually they feel all three parts. [00:44:12] So I don't have to say, oh, that's brand or that's demand, even if they're organizationally reporting in there. I can allocate the investments based on, you know, I think 40 percent of the work they did that quarter was actually tied to brand focus campaigns and 60 percent was demand. But that enables me to actually quantify it so I can quantify the investment and therefore I can quantify the ROI. [00:44:34] So a board member or a CEO can understand it. Although luckily I don't have to make that case. I'm probably, I'm probably in a very fortunate position. Yeah. [00:44:45] Phil: cool. So it sounds almost like part of your advice for maybe some of your, your friends that helps about that, that are dealing with this a bit more than, than you are at Zappy is kind of just like when you get the questions from the CEO, that's just, okay, this, all these brand things [00:45:00] that you have on your strategy for 2025. [00:45:02] How much revenue are we going to get from that? What is the ROI on that? Like event or on this like brand thing that you want to do instead of like taking those questions and trying to like put a number next to them, you're flipping that conversation and saying like, that's the wrong question. Here's kind of the portfolio of things that we're doing and marketing in 2025. [00:45:22] Some of its demand, a lot of its activation and retention. Some of it has to be brand because these are all related to each other and you can't do great demand and you can't do activation without having a good brand. So it's almost like not answering the question and being like, that is the wrong question, dear CEO. [00:45:40] Instead, think of it like this. This is an investment portfolio. [00:45:44] Communicating Brand Value to CEOs and Boards --- [00:45:44] Nataly: Um, so I think it's a balance when you're talking to board members, CEOs, they're often thinking in terms of numbers. So, what I try very carefully not to do is to approach it from a stance of, [00:46:00] like. Let me educate you about how marketing works, because that never goes well. [00:46:04] And I've had experiences like that with localization where I was like, Oh yeah, they don't want to be, you know, they don't want me to tell them about local. They just want me to answer in a way they can understand. So I often have to localize or target my audience. They, you know, use my marketing skills to target my message and adapt it. [00:46:24] The audience that I'm talking to. So what I do is turn that into a very numbers focused conversation. So for example, in that one that you gave, if I'm a marketer trying to get, um, you know, buy in for an event or an investment, what I have to do then is show them where I'm going to see the impact and quantify it. [00:46:46] So for, and I do a lot of, we do a lot of events at Zappy, we do tons. And I would say that the value for those. Is the combination of brand and demand and land and expand. So as an event [00:47:00] event that we just did, it was actually 40 percent customers that we met with and had conversations with to drive expansion and renewal motions and retention. [00:47:09] So I would allocate 40 percent to that. And then the remaining 60 percent I would say was split between brand and demand. So 30 percent was people walking by our booth, people seeing us at our talk, understanding who we are, awareness. And then the other 30 percent was tied to MQLs. Did they hand raise, did they want to talk to sales? [00:47:31] Do we have meetings at the booth? You know, who do we talk to? Have we captured it? So I have in my event. tiering strategy. There are certain types of events that I send more people to because I have, I have evidence that they, that that will result in more. MQLs. And if it's only brand, maybe we don't send sales. [00:47:48] Maybe we, you know, we do this and that, but that it's a tiered investment strategy that I'm working on for 2025, but it ties back to my overall investment model, which I think every marketer needs to [00:48:00] be able to talk to a CEO or a board member on their terms and financial language that they can understand. [00:48:06] Because I feel like that's the gap often. This is something I see in marketing all the time where we feel like. Nobody gets it. Nobody understands the need to understand it from our perspective. I try a lot to flip it on its head to say, how do I understand it from their perspective? What, what's the, the mental model they're using? [00:48:25] Because ultimately they're my audience that I have to reach. And I'm not gonna be able to teach them my language and how I understand, and I've got to learn their language. And this is very, very important. You know, maybe coming back from my, uh, my roots as a translator. [00:48:42] Yeah. [00:48:43] Phil: Hmm. A super interesting strategy. I think that you, you're almost answering like, uh, [00:48:47] Developing Executive Presence Through Clear Communication --- [00:48:47] Phil: one other question I was gonna ask you about was like this idea of executive presence and like how to tackle some of these conversations with senior level folks, but you kind of like teased out that answer already by, you should always. [00:48:59] be [00:49:00] leading with data in a sense, and like trying to explain it in a way that they would understand, as opposed to like telling them like, Hey, here, let me give you a crash course one on one on what marketing is, even though like they like to say that everyone is an expert in marketing. Right. But is that fair? [00:49:17] That like, like, what is this idea of executive presence for you? Just curious your take there. [00:49:22] Nataly: Yeah, so it does relate a lot to that. I think you're right. You know, I think executive presence is kind of hard to define. I can only really define it based on people that I've seen who are great at this. And I think the one most important thing they have in common is that they're all great communicators. [00:49:39] They speak in clear language, simple language. They know their talk track. They repeat the message. They drive home the point. That's, I think a big part of executive presence is being a really good communicator. I can't say that I have that. I try my best, but I know a lot of, uh, great people who I would call great [00:50:00] executives who have wonderful executive presence. [00:50:02] I think that's what they have in common. I do also think leading with data is a great alignment tool. So I also find the best. leaders who have a lot of great executive presence use data as a tool for storytelling, for communicating. And it's something that people can grasp, you know, they understand numbers. [00:50:26] It takes them away from All the complicated, you know, stuff, although, you know, sometimes the hubs, but we had some really complicated data that we're looking at. It's like a meeting about one cell in the spreadsheet, you know, um, so, you know, I do think that data storytelling is really important and being able to synthesize that data and give people like, here are the pieces that matter. [00:50:47] Here are the data points that matter without overwhelming them and to show them like, Hey, here's the one metric you should care about and here's why. And give them that story and be able to make it relatable for them. I [00:51:00] think that's, that's a big part of executive presence in my [00:51:02] Phil: mm-Hmm, Very cool. I'm, I'm looking at time and, uh, this conversation has, has flown by. There's a bunch of jumping on points there and, and other questions I wanted to dive into. Um, uh, I'll, I'll pick one about, like, [00:51:14] Hiring for Potential Over Experience --- [00:51:14] Phil: one of the topics you've written, uh, a lot about in your newsletter is this idea of hiring for potential and not for experience. [00:51:22] And this may be kind of a, a, a good learning for the folks in the audience that. Are doing hiring next year, or even like folks that are looking for their next gig or potentially like hunting for their next gig, um, you actually like this idea and you promote this idea. A lot of giving people a chance and hire people with this growth mentality, as opposed to judging people based on like what they've done, how can we, in your opinion, convince hiring managers to think. [00:51:50] Cause like I've had the pleasure of working with forward thinking, progressive like recruiters and hiring teams that think this way, but they're pretty rare. And like, they're, they're not at every company. [00:52:00] And I'm sure folks in the audience work for companies that don't think like that, like years of experience, company names, job titles, like how long you've left, you like stayed at one company. [00:52:10] Like how do we get hiring managers to care less about that and more about the things that actually matter? Like how, what's your advice there? [00:52:18] Nataly: Yeah. So sadly, I think it's a marketing exercise to get in the door at a lot of companies and it's about having the right channel and the right channel is usually a connection at that company because. Even though people, recruiters will do their best to like look at years of experience, company names, job titles, and all that. [00:52:39] The truth is hiring is very hard and you never know if it's going to be a good fit until you actually get that person in the door. What you can look for are leading indicators. And so, um, You know, I find it's going to be hard to convince hiring managers to change their behavior. But what you [00:53:00] can do is simply look at the companies that are more likely to care about that, maybe based on their values and maybe target those companies. [00:53:08] What I will say is HubSpot cared about that from the very beginning because the theory was. you know, even looking at their resumes, have they done a lot of different things? If so, they're probably not afraid of change. They're probably not afraid of growth. It, you know, let's see, you know, what, were they successful in multiple different things? [00:53:28] If so, there's an adaptability. And, Attribute there and probably a growth mindset. You know, I also look at HubSpot. I got, you know, some great lessons in this because we really were intentional about looking for specific characteristics when hiring at that stage growth. Mindset was number one and adaptability, but we also looked for things like humility and the way I look at humility is like, you know, I will stalk people. [00:53:55] I will look at them online. I will read everything they've written that can be found on Google. I [00:54:00] will look deep, deep into the page 57 to find what I can find. I will do searches. I will do everything because I want to know. How that person thinks and a lot of how people think is reflected in what they've said and what they've written. [00:54:15] So I also look, even if I can't find much about them online, I usually look at their CV, their resume. And I pay very careful attention to cover letters. I know a lot of people think cover letters are throwaway and you shouldn't care about them, but they actually say a lot about the person. How do they express themselves? [00:54:33] What did they choose to say? You know, even in the way they describe things in their jobs that they've done, are they taking full credit for it? Did they say they're part of a team? Did they use a lot of I, did they use a lot of we, you know, are they. over inflating the importance of that role. Cause usually the way they choose to show up on a resume is how they show up at work and how they will be as a colleague and how they will be as a team member. [00:54:57] So I look very carefully at that [00:55:00] stuff. And I also, you know, when we do reference checks, I ask if what was on their It is a match based on that person's experience with them. And if it's not, it's a big red flag for me and I don't hire that person, you know? So I care a lot about those type of details. [00:55:15] And we learned a lot of that at HubSpot. I also look a lot for like an immigrant mindset because people are like, No, frankly, I feel like a lot of people who are willing to pick up, move to another country, learn another language, they probably have a growth mindset and they probably are quite adaptable and they probably have a tolerance for change that is going to be needed in a startup or a scale up environment. [00:55:39] So I do specifically look for that either that or, you know, people who've lived abroad, moved, been curious, changed roles, things [00:55:47] like that. [00:55:48] Phil: That's awesome advice, Natalie. I appreciate your time there. Um, yeah, I got one last question for you. There's, there's so many more that, that I wanted to get to, but, uh, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll clean the conversation by, uh, asking the same question I ask everyone on the [00:56:00] show. [00:56:00] Embracing Work-Life Integration Over Balance --- [00:56:00] Phil: Um, you're a CMO, obviously a team leader. You're also a newsletter author. You're Well traveled speaker, but you're also a mother, you're a musician and you're a nerd who writes snail mail matters to a lot of your best friends. You also keep a handwritten journal too. Uh, clearly you've got a lot going on in your life. One question we have everyone on the show is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? [00:56:22] And what advice do you have for finding balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy? [00:56:28] Nataly: Yeah. Oh my gosh. This is such a tough question. And it also assumes that I'm happy. Who knows if I really am compared to like, compared to whose standard? I don't know. Um, what I would say is I do. Not really believe in this whole concept of work life balance. You know, to me, it really conjures the image of somebody like walking on a tightrope, trying to get everything right. [00:56:51] You know, I do believe in work life integration and to me that implies things are in motion, things are moving, change is normal, [00:57:00] change is constant and finding the right intensity level of where you focus at any given point in time. And finding work that aligns with those passions and your purpose. [00:57:11] That's what I care about. You know, I'm, I'm pretty busy. I'm a dance mom. I'm a cheer mom and I have one daughter in competitive dance, one in competitive cheer. Um, I am a nerd. I love to read. I love to write. I'm also an introvert. So I say no to a lot of things. I have a lot of intentional life omissions. [00:57:28] Phil: Nice. [00:57:29] Nataly: I don't go to every party. [00:57:31] I, you know, skip out on a lot of the let's go, you know, do this thing with all of our work colleagues. You know, sometimes I don't have the energy for it because I put a lot of my heart and soul into my job and sometimes I need the time to recharge. So I don't do things the way everybody does and that's okay because I think we want to be unique and authentic to who we are. [00:57:51] And, you know, that's, that's kind of how I approach it. I like to put my energy and intensity into the things that matter for me and that are, [00:58:00] you know, aligned with my purpose and what I care about accomplishing. And I don't really think about. Work life balance that much. What I do is if I feel like one area of my life is more intense than another, then I recognize it and I, you know, make some changes, but I, I'm not consciously thinking like, am I balanced today? [00:58:16] Oh no. Like, I don't, I don't care about that. Cause we go through phases in life. There are phases when you focus more on your family. There are phases when you focus more on your job. That's cool. That's normal and that's okay. And that's, that's all I'm doing. [00:58:31] Phil: awesome advice. Yeah. I really appreciate you sharing that. I feel like emissions is like a theme of, of this episode, and definitely really with that being an an insurer myself, Natalie, this is super fun. Really appreciate your time. Uh, thanks so much for, for sharing all your wisdom in there. We'll always see, uh, link out your newsletter to folks, uh, folks wanna check out Zappy also. [00:58:49] Um, thanks again for your time. This is super fun, Natalie. [00:58:51] Nataly: Thank you, Phil. It was a pleasure to be here.