Why Real Localization Means Translating Trust, Not Just a Website: With Payoneer's LATAM GTM Lead, Diego Mariz

Most companies expanding into Latin America treat localization as a checklist: translate the site, hire a bilingual rep, swap the currency, leave the pricing and the go-to-market machine untouched. The motion underneath stays exactly what it was at home, now delivered in Spanish. That version of "localization" reliably underperforms, because it changes the packaging of a market-entry strategy without changing anything about how trust is earned, how buyers actually want to be reached, or how deals move through an organization once they start. The work that matters doesn't show up in a translation memory.

Diego Mariz is Director of Business Development LATAM at the cross-border payments platform Payoneer, where he leads sales and go-to-market across Latin America. He built the same muscle before this, running go-to-market across a dozen countries in the region as general manager for Otter, and earlier leading customer acquisition at a Brazilian fintech, which has given him a close, country-by-country read on where the standard playbook breaks.

"It's not just a matter of translating your website to Spanish or Portuguese. You have to actually translate your proof of concept, your trust," Mariz says. What that means in practice is the difference between a market entry that stalls and one that takes hold.

Translate the proof, transfer the channel

The gap Mariz points to lies between translation and evidence. "If you only have use cases from US companies on your website, this won't bring you LATAM customers at all," he points out. Translation is table stakes, the necessary but insufficient first step. What actually earns entry is proof rooted in the specific country.

Mariz frames the real task as producing something with local weight, like a regional customer case or country-specific content that demonstrates the product works here, not just there. Absent a local base to point to, this content is what stands in, and building it is the part most expansion plans skip.

The second mismatch Mariz sees is in how companies reach people. He's blunt that the default US channels transplant poorly, because the region runs on a different one. "LATAM is very WhatsApp driven, and this is completely opposite of the US," he says.

The practical payoff is friction removed at every step: an outreach or response path that lives on WhatsApp, whether the lead came inbound or outbound, is what turns a first touch into an actual conversation. Cold calls are no more welcome here than anywhere else, he notes, but the channel a company chooses for engagement determines whether it gets a reply at all. For a team porting its US cadence wholesale, the medium is often the reason the sequence works or dies.

Institutional trust is a separate hurdle from product fit

At the enterprise level, Mariz describes a form of trust that has nothing to do with how good the product is. The buyer's question is about permanence. "You're an outside company coming to my country. What guarantees that in three years you'll still be here?" he says, voicing the concern he hears in large deals.

A prospect can like the product and still hesitate over whether the vendor will exit Colombia or pull out of Brazil the moment regional economics tighten. That worry is institutional rather than functional, and it scales with deal size, running lighter for SMBs and heavier for enterprise. Clearing it takes brand trust and a visible, credible commitment to staying in the market, which is a bar that a polished demo alone never reaches.

Sequence by signal, not by map size

Deciding where to enter first is where Mariz most resists the single-bucket instinct. Global companies tend to see the region as one market, or reach straight for its two largest. "Brazil is not one thing. Mexico is not one thing," he says, noting that the biggest countries are internally regional enough that selling into them is really several go-to-market problems at once, with distinct needs from Mexico City to Monterrey.

His preferred method is empirical: run inbound across a set of countries and read the response as a proxy for product-market fit. "You cannot state this by heart, but you can have a pretty good feeling on how good the product-market fit is based on your inbound response," he says. That often argues for starting in a smaller, highly receptive market and using that foothold to spread. Regulation varies enough country to country that fit, not population, should set the order.

Pull the stakeholders in early

The deepest difference Mariz draws between US and LATAM selling is cultural and structural. US selling, in his read, is comparatively transactional: a clear yes or no, an obvious next step, few unstated conditions. LATAM tends to be neither as direct nor as flat. "Structures in LATAM are typically a bit more hierarchical," he explains. An individual analyst who could champion a purchase internally in a US company may lack the standing to do so here, and formal approval committees are often absent. The result is a longer, more relationship-dependent path where the timing and framing of an internal ask matter as much as the ask itself.

In his experience, this is where reps who trust an internal sponsor to carry the deal often get burned. "I've seen tons of reps with a solid forecast, and the deal never closes. They just keep postponing," he says, because the relevant stakeholders were never brought to the table. He puts the responsibility squarely on the rep to force that, and to influence the close directly rather than relying on a single sponsor. In practice he expects to need two or three sponsors per deal before a forecast is trustworthy enough to count on.

Automate the top of the funnel, keep humans on the close

Mariz draws a clean line when it comes to automating without eroding the trust the whole market runs on. The top of the funnel works the same as anywhere, just on a different channel. "The playbooks are the same for the first outreach," he says: build the list, use AI agents, automate the customized first touch, engage the lead. The constraint is WhatsApp's own limits on mass outreach, which make the channel harder to scale than email but no less essential.

Past that first engagement, the region asks for more human contact than others. Closing mid-market and enterprise deals without live conversation, and in-person meetings where possible, is where automation runs out of room, because that face-to-face contact is how the trust that drives the deal gets built. The more local the company, the more that holds. "If you're talking about IT companies, they have a much more American mindset, but if you're dealing with really local Latin companies, then you need to stick to the human part."