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?
Any idea's are appreciated.
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.
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.
Personally though I'd just be staying up late and calling people direct.