What type of roles do I need when starting my business?

This article is intended to give you some high level pointers for when you are looking to start your own business and looking to expand into Asia Pacific.

So, you've taken the plunge and decided to invest in the fastest growing marketing in the world, Asia Pacific. Congratulations! Now what?

Starting a satellite office, or even an APAC headquarters, can be daunting, especially if you haven't lived in these parts. I tackle the question of where to locate your APAC HQ in another of my blog posts, so in this we will talk about what type of roles you should start off with.

Our advice is to stay simple and focused. Building brand awareness is key, particularly if you have no clients in region, or only a few. Having a strong Sales Director/VP Sales/General Manager is a key hire. This person will be tasked with overseeing overall growth and expansion KPI's, and you will be relying on this person for their knowledge of the market, the industry, and overall sales acumen. Don't be daunted by having to pay for this - you get what you pay for. Hiring someone new in their career with the mindset that they are hungrier isn't necessarily the right strategy, particularly if there are people to be led and managed.

Hiring a strong head of Demand Generation should be one of your first hires. Without brand awareness and pipeline, there's no point hiring other roles! The Head of Demand Generation will be tasked with ensuring that global demand generation campaigns are localised and tailored to local market conditions. Remember, not everything that works in the USA will work out here...

Now you need your sales team. Depending upon your sales strategy/model, you will need to hire both a "hunter", or new logo acquisition style rep, and a "farmer", or expansion style rep. The two are different in styles and I would not advise you asking one rep to do both.

Next, you will need an inside sales rep (SDR). At MLTG Corp, we advise a ratio of 1 SDR to 2 AE's. You can stretch this to a ratio of 1:3, but in our experience, performance goes down the better your Demand Generation programs start working and driving inbound MQLs.

At the same time, you need to hire a Customer Success Manager (CSM). This critical to your success. Focus your operation around the customer, and good things will happen. Particularly if you are a SaaS organisation, renewals are key.

Having local Technical Support is also key to your success. Don't make the mistake of setting your CSM up as your defacto technical support person. Keep them away from this and have CSM's focus on serving their customer and ensuring they renew.

And lastly, this will depend upon your business model if you have Professional Services. If you provide professional services, make sure to have at least one person on the ground to drive implementations.

Now you can move in to Phase 2 of your operation. You need to decide whether you are a direct sales focused organisation, or want to embark on a Partner/Channel operation. You also now will be ready to start thinking of opening in a new location and and what roles to replicate, and what to centralise. But that's for another blog post :)

Good luck and if you want to run your strategy by us, please reach out to info@mltgcorp.com. We'd be only too happy to chat.

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