When the Sales Conversation Gets Interesting
Ilya Spiridonov spent twelve years at Alconost moving from outbound sales grind to Chief Commercial Officer, and the most honest thing he says early in this conversation is that outbound is still a bloodbath. That candor sets the tone for everything that follows. What has changed, he explains, is not the difficulty of finding new clients but the quality of what happens once they arrive. Inbound is now strategically more important than it has ever been at Alconost, and the reason is simple: buyers are doing their own homework before they ever want to talk to a sales rep. They want to explore, evaluate, and form a view before a vendor gets involved. That shift, Ilya argues, is pushing marketing and sales closer together than most localization companies have ever allowed them to be, with marketing owning real lead generation accountability and sales feeding back what they are actually hearing from clients in discovery conversations.
The consultative angle is where Ilya’s perspective gets genuinely differentiated. He describes a conversation that happens constantly now: a prospect arrives and says they have already translated their content using an AI engine and just need someone to review it. That is the moment, he says, where a good commercial person plants the right seed. Which engine did you use? Why that one? Are you confident it performs equally well across Chinese, Japanese, German, and Italian? Those questions do not close a deal immediately, but they open a conversation about risk, workflow, and whether the client’s current setup is actually fit for purpose. Alconost runs evaluation cycles across fourteen AI engines, testing output by content type and language pair, scoring results with human linguists, and building a recommended workflow that is specific to each client’s actual content profile. That is consulting, and it is becoming the front door to the commercial relationship.
Account Management as a Retention Engine
One of the most concrete operational decisions Ilya discusses is Alconost’s move, roughly two years ago, to build a dedicated account management function sitting inside the commercial side of the business rather than inside operations. The reasoning is worth understanding carefully. Project managers are busy delivering translations today or even tonight. They do not have the bandwidth or the mandate to think about relationship development, cross-sell opportunities, QBRs, or the strategic direction of an account. Account managers do. They have the conversations that surface what clients are actually worried about, what their goals are, and what risks they are quietly carrying. Ilya is direct that the ROI number is not fully quantified yet, but the strategic logic proved itself quickly. When AI started making serious inroads into the translation space, it was the account management team that proactively went to long-standing human-translation clients and said, there is a new service level worth considering. That conversation cost Alconost revenue per word in the short term. It bought client trust and retention in the long term, and clients who kept their localization budget but expanded their language coverage because AI made volume more affordable. Ilya also flags something worth noting for any services business leader: losing one strategically large account can do more damage than losing ten smaller ones. The account management investment was always primarily about protecting the top of the portfolio.
What the Industry Is Still Getting Wrong on Value
Ilya is honest that the market is flat for Alconost right now, not dying but not growing at the pace it used to. The volume being washed out by clients moving to in-house AI is real. What he believes, though, is that the localization companies treating this as a pricing problem are solving the wrong equation. Translation as a raw output is becoming a commodity. The knowledge layer sitting above it, knowing which engine to use for which content type in which language, how to build QA into the workflow, how to think about risk appetite across different content categories, when to keep humans in the loop and where you cannot afford not to, is not a commodity. It is expertise that most clients cannot build internally fast enough to keep pace with how quickly the underlying models are changing. His closing point lands cleanly: any business needs localization, the question is when. The commercial opportunity for vendors who can have that conversation early, and frame localization as competitive advantage rather than translation cost, is still wide open.
If this conversation pushed your thinking on how localization gets sold, retained, and valued in an AI-driven market, you can Watch on YouTube for the full visual conversation or Listen on Simplecast wherever you prefer to consume long-form audio. If you want to connect with Ilya directly, find him on LinkedIn, and if you have trouble tracking him down, reach out to Robin and he will make the introduction.
Robin Ayoub 
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