#75: Alconost CCO Ilya Spiridonov on prioritizing localization in the B2B marketing funnel

Ilya Spiridonov: The agile brand.

Speaker B: Welcome to the B2B Agility podcast, where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing, with a focus on the people, processes, data, and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, bestselling author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.

Greg Kilstrom: Despite the global opportunity available to so many businesses, most are constrained by finite resources. So the more interesting question isn't what should we translate? But rather, what's the real cost of not localizing the right customer touchpoint? And how do you even begin to calculate that? Risk agility requires more than just speed. It demands the sensitivity to know when a universal message fails and a local one is needed. It's the capacity to pivot your entire customer experience to resonate in a new market, not just as a translation, but as a native conversation. Today we're going to talk about navigating the complexities of global expansion. We'll get into the strategic decisions that leaders have to make when localizing content, such as where to spend the budget for maximum impact, and the critical choice between leveraging AI for scale and speed versus deploying human experts for nuance and connection. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Ilya Spiridonov, Chief Commercial Officer at Alkonost. Ilya, welcome to the show.

Ilya Spiridonov: Hi. Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me here.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Alkonost?

Ilya Spiridonov: Sure. So I've been in localization for the last 10 years. Funny thing, uh, is when I joined, I was like, well, localization is not exactly the hottest topic, so I'm probably going to look around and see. Maybe I'll find something else. So, 10 years later, here I am, and I mostly work with clients, so it's very exciting.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, love it. Well, yeah, let's. We're going to talk about a few things here, but I want to start from the, uh, from the strategic lens here and really how we prioritize things. And so, you know, when you advise a company that's just starting its localization journey, where do you see the most common and maybe, uh, most most costly misallocation of resources across the marketing and sales funnel?

Ilya Spiridonov: Great question. So, I mean, one of the biggest mislocation is probably assuming that going to market requires localizing everything and at once, right Right away. Well, in reality, in many cases, not in all of the cases, localization, or especially early stage localization, it should look like experimentation more than like a full scale rollout. Of course it has to follow the go to market strategy, but otherwise it has to be more agile and more like step by step.

Greg Kilstrom: And so, you know, beyond just looking at the customer journey map, what data or signals should a marketing leader be looking for to even determine whether localizing a specific touch point, say you know, a series of webinars versus the product's UI will actually move the needle on revenue in a new region?

Ilya Spiridonov: Well, it's a good question because it perfectly fits my favorite answer. It depends the NBA answer.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: And obviously it depends on your industry. Right. Are you a B2C or are you a B2B? What kind of content do you have? I like to look at, uh, funnels. Right. So and again, off the top of my head, there are kind of two types of signals. The first one is the C level type. Like your competition, for example. Is your competition doing that already? Right. If you're very good at what you're doing, you only have like three competitors. One is localizing, the other two are, um, not. If you start localizing, you only really have one competitor. Right. But now if we move uh, forward to more like down to earth, uh, signals, uh, let's say you probably want to look at your traffic from regions that are non English speaking, but you only have like English only pages. Right. If you see more traffic from Germany, for example. Right. Maybe it's time to start localizing into Germany. Right. Then obviously talking to your clients. B2B businesses assume that localization is not always for them. Right. Because they're B2B. They sell to corporate in most cases. In reality, many B2B businesses are B2B2C. From localization perspective, they're B2B especially like, I don't know if you take businesses like a CRM product. Right. It's a B2B business, but in reality the users are the CPU.

Speaker B: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: If the users are multilingual, they need to be able to or want to be, want to consume the content in other languages potentially. Right. And then again, looking at the pipeline at the funnel, do you see sharp drop offs in uh, signup completion from specific regions? Right. Comparing these kind of signals across specific regions is very important. Right. Churn rates, let's say in mobile products. Right. Refund requests, uh, I don't know, heat maps maybe showing confusion around product UI.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: And again, different types of businesses SaaS what is your demo to close rates in a specific region? Are they different in this region? Maybe localization is going to help. Right. For E commerce, it's things like checkout completion, abandoned carts, for marketplaces or for subscriptions, it's like trial to paid conversion ratios and so on and so on. So in reality you want to look at the funnel, be it, you know, bottom of the funnel, top of the funnel, see where there are, uh, irregularities, so to say, on a regional kind of basis. Right. And try to think or hypothesize, is localization likely to improve something here or not? And then make the decision. All right, I'm going to localize my ui, I'm going to localize my landing pages, I'm going to localize my ads, bottom of the funnel, and so on and so on.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, in a true analytic approach, as opposed to, you know, just making some assumptions that everyone is, you know, that it's going to benefit greatly no matter what you do. Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: On the other hand, if you know exactly like your product is highly scalable and you don't have that much content, you, you, you're not gonna, you know, spend all your money localizing. Just go for it. Right?

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah. Why not? Yeah, yeah. So I also want to talk about the, um, you know, the decision between human translation and AI translation or often gets boiled down to cost versus quality. Uh, but what are the maybe less obvious factors like brand voice risk, legal implications, speed of iteration required that should also be part of an executive's decision framework there?

Ilya Spiridonov: Well, uh, it's actually not only cost and quality. Right. And also speed of iteration is like the third factor. Suddenly it becomes like a multivariate problem.

Greg Kilstrom: Uh, right.

Ilya Spiridonov: But in the end of the day, it boils down to risk. And uh, especially in large enterprises, choosing between AI or human or a mix of the two, it's usually about matching the workflow to the risk and risk appetite. And here we see that again, especially in larger enterprises, it really depends on the types of content that you have. Right. So for example, legal and compliance exposure. One bad sentence can be very expensive. So there, you might not want to experiment.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: Again, there are content or types of content that are not as business critical, so less risk, but there are varying, let's say the speed of iteration there is critical. For example, you generate a lot of, uh, SEO content. It's not exactly business critical, but you want to have it translated for SEO purposes. It's quite large volume and so on. Right. You don't want to invest A lot of money there, but it's kind of still crucial for the business. So you go with AI or AI with human envelope and so on. Again, there is a, like a very broad range of service levels, especially with AI nowadays. Right. To choose from.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah. And I mean, so you mentioned, you know, the hybrid model, which, you know, could include all of the above. Right. And like, could you maybe walk us through what's a, what's a practical example of how a company might use, you know, a hybrid localization engine that blends AI and machine learning and human translation together?

Ilya Spiridonov: Sure, great question. I mean, you probably want to first take a step back and look at your infrastructure. Especially with enterprise B2B businesses that have quite a lot of content types. Right. They usually have teams responsible for each content type. And when localizing it's important to make sure that localization is centralized because you want to make sure that translations are consistent from the brand voice perspective, from terminology perspective.

Speaker B: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: Uh, you want to make sure that somebody is responsible for localization for working with all those teams. Right. So localization becomes centralized and from there you need to build some sort of, you know, infrastructural kind of layer to make sure you can make things happen before even, you know, thinking about hybrid workflows and so on. But as soon as you have that, as soon as you have the uh, process the workflows, the team there is responsible for localization.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: Then you can start matching again, matching the risk to the service level. You want to, let's say you have ui, you can use, I don't know, human first with uh, with the uh, linguistic quality assurance, which is done usually on staging server, for example.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: And again, you want to make sure that you have a staging environment to test the localized builds. And this means that you kind of want everybody's buy in or stakeholder buy in, for example, at the CTO level, because that's going to affect your, you know, development culture and ultimately going to affect your localization. And then as you start matching the risk or types of content to the service levels, you kind of build different workflows for different teams of different types of content.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: So for uh, like, like I mentioned, SEO content is going to be AI plus posterity, for example, or without posterity, legal content is going to be human only. UI content is going to be human first with the uh, additional qa, like functional or linguistic QA on the localized build and so on.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, got it. So let's talk a little bit about scaling and operation, operationalizing at Scale as well. Because, you know, localization, like many things as, as it scales, it has the potential to, you know, to at the very least perform, um, not as well if, if not break altogether. What are some of the key operational hurdles? Whether it's workflow, stakeholder buy in, all, you know, technology integration, you know, what are some of those things that you see companies stumble on when they're moving from ad hoc projects to a more continuous programmatic approach?

Ilya Spiridonov: Yeah, well, I think the biggest risk or potential risk is not designing for continuous localization in the first place. Because in many cases we see that product teams will say, all right, we're going to build this beautiful product and then at some point we're going to localize. It doesn't work this way. In many cases you need to design for continuous localization, right? You need to make sure that if it's continuous, you need to have incremental updates instead of massive batches of content. Right. Uh, you need to make sure that your code base, if it's a digital product, supports multilingual, supports multilinguality, supports, uh, ICUs, plural numerals, and so on and so on. So you need to have, like I mentioned stakeholder buy in, like CTO buy in.

Speaker B: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: Um, and uh, this buy in, uh, means that people might need to change their behavior or team might need to change their processes, right? Because everybody wants localization, but no one wants to change kind of behavior, right?

Greg Kilstrom: Totally.

Ilya Spiridonov: So, uh, you want the workflows to be there, to be described, to be accessible or to be known to different teams, right? Because workflow chaos is one of the kind of risks, right? Metrics. If you have a dedicated localization pipeline, localization team, it has to have their own KPIs, your own metrics, right. And again, technology, I also mentioned that technology is key and it's really important to start building this infrastructure layer on day one, because without technology you can't build those, especially these hybrid workflows that we mentioned, AI plus human and expertise, which is becoming even more important. Uh, because what's been happening in the translation industry is that suddenly for the past couple of years, everybody switched from human translation to AI and AI based workflows. But that requires quite a lot of expertise in house. If you're not doing this with a vendor, you're doing this in house. That requires quite a lot of expertise which needs to be either nurtured internally or borrowed externally through a vendor, through stuff and so on. So the expertise in localization, especially since we're talking about cost Cutting, usually with AI, and therefore the risks that originate usually cost cutting. You need to have the expertise to mitigate your risks. So that. That would be like the key factors, I would say.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned metrics as well, and I want to get a little more to that as well. So obviously every business is a little bit different and some industries vastly different than others. But what's a general approach for how leaders should measure ROI of localization? You know, are we talking about, you know, direct attribution to regional sales, things like that, or are there other ways to think about this as well?

Ilya Spiridonov: Well, I would say the general approach is that it's not necessarily directly measurable.

Greg Kilstrom: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: Like, let's say in marketing, brand awareness, can you. I mean, you can measure it at some point or in some cases, but not directly. Probably. Right. Uh, there are direct revenue metrics. Obviously you go into this market and there are actually metrics that are, well, kind of strange. But you would say, all right, this market has brought me X money, which means, uh, and I know that localization cost me this. So you can kind of measure roi, roi. So let's say it brings me like X revenue localizing to one language.

Speaker B: Right.

Ilya Spiridonov: And you can actually measure, based on this measure, different locales, different geographies. So that would be like a very straightforward approach. But what I want to say is that sometimes localization, even though it's not measurable, it is still crucial because it gives you in most cases, competitive edge. And localization in most cases is about competition and competition globally. Uh, so that's, that's, that's the like.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and so I want to talk a little bit about, you know, what's, what's coming down, you know, the future stuff. Let's just put it that way. And so certainly, uh, there's on this show and everywhere else, there's been lots of talk about generative AI and all the things that it's capable of doing and as well as limitations. But as it rapidly evolves, uh, you know, some are. May argue that deliberate localization may. The need for it may decrease as real time on the fly translation becomes more seamless. What's, what's your take on this? You know, what's. Will AI eventually make localization strategy obsolete or will it, uh, will it simply change the nature of the strategist's job?

Ilya Spiridonov: In my opinion, I believe it's the latter. So with, with the rapid advancements in gen AI, uh, the complexity grows exponentially. Yeah, we are seeing that from, from our clients Experience from our own experience. And as complexity grows, we are also seeing that the strategic approach or localization strategies don't really change because localization strategy describes where you want, what you want to do, how you want to do it. What changes is the implementation. So technology allows us to do more things with less, so to say. And, uh, it kind of opens ways to achieve goals that were kind of hardly achievable previously. For example, you kind of can make the move from localization to contextualization. You can, uh, you can think about dynamic personalization by region, not just by Persona. It's not just localizing for Germany, but more culturalizing for region. Localized value proposition, not just localized copy. So it's more about transcreation or creating this ultra personalized, ultra regional copy, which is no longer about just translating your webpage. It's about more transcreation. And technology is enabling that. The question is, uh, how do you use that technology to do that?

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, yeah. And does that extend beyond. Cause I think a lot of the focus right now is on text or, you know, on audio, you know, but text to audio, does that extend beyond those mediums? And, uh, you know, and when do we start seeing those things? And I guess what. Yeah, I'll leave it there.

Ilya Spiridonov: Yeah, I mean, it does extend, especially in industries like, uh, game development, for example, or art. Right. Where you, where you localize for the local culture. Not only localize the text or you also localize characters in games, for example. So that's, you, uh, know that's already happening, actually.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah, definitely. Well, Ilya, thanks so much for joining today. I really appreciate your ideas and insights. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?

Ilya Spiridonov: I can see you're out of complex questions now to the easy ones. It's an easy question. I listen to your podcast.

Greg Kilstrom: Oh, of course, of course.

Ilya Spiridonov: But on a more serious note, I mean, I am blessed with a position where I stay very close to the clients. And it's the main agility kind of driver for me. And by listening to the clients, I learned quite a lot. Like, a lot. Right. And what I try to do, I try to always feed that back, feed that knowledge back to the team, which makes the team more agile, which makes the company, the business, more agile. So, yeah, you just kind of need to know what you're doing, who you're doing it for, and you're going to stay agile.

Greg Kilstrom: Yeah. Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Ilya Spiridonov, Chief Commercial Officer at Alkonost, for joining the show. You can learn more about Ilya and Alkof us by following the links in the show notes.

Ilya Spiridonov: Thank you.

Greg Kilstrom: Thank you.

Speaker B: Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.

Ilya Spiridonov: The agile brand.