HubSpot’s Paul Rios on Building Success in LATAM

When Paul Rios first started selling into Latin America for HubSpot several years ago, he remembers that customers were surprised and delighted that he could speak in their preferred language, Spanish. Nowadays, the game has changed, and customers expect communication in their native language.

In this podcast, Rios, director of sales, Latin America direct, sits down with Jason Nyhus, SVP of global sales, marketing and partnerships to talk about ecommerce growth in Latin America and how localization is a key to ecommerce success.

Ecommerce growth in Latin America For HubSpot, success in Latin America means higher expectations— for HubSpot and its customers. Many of those expectations have to do with localizing the purchasing process.

“They expect continuous investment from a brand of this size in continuously eliminating friction in the local contracting experience,” Rios notes in his discussion on the Latin American market at 19:13. “Increasingly people are asking to contract in local currency to help them to maximize the utilization of local tax codes and infrastructure.”

Localization of HubSpot growth HubSpot takes a nuanced approach to deciding which markets to enter, says Rios. While there are quantifiable metrics they use, such as the number of mid-sized companies in a given region and potential penetration of that market, leadership also uses qualitative variables, including political and economic stability.

Rios says in the early days of HubSpot, there were two trains of thought – one that advocated a traditional, metrics-based approach, and another that framed opportunity from a marketing perspective: follow the demand.

“Those two camps were often competing with each other,” Rios notes in his discussion of ecommerce growth in Latin America at 30:18. “Now it’s morphed into something more complex and more nuanced.”

Brands should start with local marketing For brands looking to enter a new geography, they should start with the low-hanging fruit of localizing their marketing collateral. From there, brands can expand into more complex localization efforts.

“You do the easier stuff, and then also the table stakes, which is the software itself being in the local language,” Rios says in his discussion of localization at 33:51. “Then you incrementally go after the more complicated things.”