We are an IT services company based in France with offices in Paris, Bucharest (Romania) and Shanghai (China). We will turn over around 52 M€ in 2013 and have over 500 employees of whom 40 are in Shanghai. Most of our business is conducted in French but all our Chinese colleagues speak both French and English so we are looking to offer their very cost-effective services to the US market.
Our regular clients include banks, insurance companies and major industrials looking for IT maintenance, development and support on a range of systems from IBM mainframe through Java, dotnet, client servers to business systems such as Oracle.
How would we find a suitable candidate or partner to help us enter the US market?
The way I hire anyone is to find someone who's currently employed in that role for a company in my existing market. You can find that person using a few techniques.
1) LInkedIn: Search who's currently doing technical sales for companies similar to yours, and reach out to them to get advice on "How to hire someone like them?".
2) Customers: Connect with a company using a similar product and ask them who's the most impressive technical salesperson they've met - contact that person.
Another technique for finding-the-right-person is to search on LinkedIn for a person who previously worked at a similar company that would manage that kind of person (ex: Sales Manager) and ask for advice on hiring... then you can ask who they worked at, at the previous company that impressed them.
Build the list using this technique, then win them over to join you for US domination :).
Call anytime for more tips like this.
