Take Your Company Global: The New Rules of International Expansion

So the focus of my talk today is going to be shifting the focus to go to market. And I want to address some of the hard truths about the industry's most perplexing questions. So let's go ahead and get started. Uh So as I was just introduced, I'm Natalie Kelly. I am a longtime international vice president at Hubspot and a bunch of different go to market uh roles all involving international and localization. And I have a new role that's going to be announced next week. Um I have left hub spot and I'm moving on to a new opportunity. Uh So if you want to know more details about that, go to linkedin and you'll, you'll see my updates next week and I do have a new book coming out in September. Um I have previously written a book with yo called Found In Translation. Uh Some of you might know that title and then I have a new one coming out, take your company Global in September that I'm very excited about, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I'm here to talk about today is those perplexing questions that I mentioned at the very beginning. So let's take a look at those questions. So in our industry, in the localization industry, since I can remember, and I've been in this industry since I graduated from college in 1996 we have tried really hard to answer a few core questions to really get at the heart of the value and and what our industry is all about. And the three long standing questions that I believe and and in my experience over these many, many years in this industry, the ones that we keep coming back to are listed here. So the first one is why don't most companies view localization as a strategic function? That's number one, that's a common question that comes up over and over and it's very frustrating and all the people in charge of localization, all the vendors, everyone is trying to get localization to be seen as strategic. The second one is how can we prove the value? Like if nobody believes that we are providing strategic value, what value can we show? How can we quantify it? How can we show our impact? And then the third one is why is it so hard to get other people to see how important localization really is. We work in this industry. We know it's important, but it's very hard to convince people who work in other functions within a business, especially at the executive level to understand how important localization is. So these are the key perplexing questions that I want to walk us through today. And my hope is that we can refer back to them throughout the rest of the sessions and have these in the back of our mind and maybe debate them and discuss them in the future as well.