

How to find a salesman for your startup (or product, whatever) - dublinclontarf

I've just gotten two developers (Java, C#, PHP) and a website designer for consulting and custom application development (as well as website design etc.)<p>Being that we're all in China how can I get a hold of a salesman (is that even the right person I should be looking for?) in the US(or Canada/Australia/UK) to sell our service?<p>Any idea's are appreciated.
======
rlpb
One piece of advice I've had with Synctus is that the best person to sell a
product initially is the expert (in my case: me).

The advantages are: \- I can understand the situation my customers are in
because of years of previous experience with them \- I know the product inside
out (as I made it!) \- I know about all the alternative solutions and all the
pros and cons of them \- From a customer's point of view, I am the one they
are best off speaking to

Salespeople will of course learn some of this this, but ultimately they cannot
match me. So I am learning sales (and there is a lot to learn!), rather than
trying to get a salesperson to learn my product (I've tried this and haven't
been convinced - technical products are hard to understand).

I would say that this applies for an early stage startup like me. Obviously
this cannot scale, so at some point having salespeople would become necessary.

I'm not sure how this applies to you because of the territorial aspect - but I
do believe that you'll be at a disadvantage if you are unable to sell your
product yourself.

------
waxman
Selling a service in a different country/culture than your own is a lot harder
than you think. I would strongly recommend that you exhaust your local market
(the one that you know and understand infinitely better), before you think
about expanding abroad.

I'm speaking from my own experience. My first start-up was a tutoring /
language instruction tool. The biggest market in the world for this is in
South Korea, so we tried to launch there first. Big mistake. A few specific
problems:

1) It's really hard to evaluate a) how good a foreign salesperson is, and b)
how well they know the local market. Think about it. Most of sales relies on
subtle, cultural cues (body language, slight intonations, really specific
language), and it's difficult to gauge this. Much more importantly, though,
anyone can tell you "oh yeah, I understand my local market in X space," and
this is really hard to evaluate if you're not from/in that place.

2) Localizing is hard. Even if you hire coders and designers from the place
you're trying to get into, again, evaluating their work is hard. Their work
might look awesome to you (if you get lucky), but the viewing public of your
launch market might think it looks terrible.

3) Your service probably has great applications around you that you haven't
even thought of. For us, our workforce of smart, college-age language
teachers, were equally suited for tutoring and and college counseling in the
US as they were for teaching English to students in Korea. And the big
difference was, we knew the US market infinitely better.

These are just things I found to be true in my own experience, but if you want
to launch in foreign markets, then good luck and all the power to you.

If you do, the one piece of advice I would definitely give you is to find a
local partner (someone who has YOUR interests in mind, whether through equity,
etc.) and use that person to fill out your team/vet your talent there. This
can mitigate a lot of the aforementioned problems.

~~~
dublinclontarf
Actually I'm British/Irish so the only issue is country (culturewise I'm very
Americanised).

------
AlexBlom
If you are offshore, have not network and cannot relocate your best bet is to
hire a local recruiter.

Personally though I'd just be staying up late and calling people direct.

