A sales director already selling in your market.

A director is the answer where the sale needs a person on the ground: equipment a buyer wants to see running, an installation that begins with a site survey, a commissioning conversation held next to the machine, or a channel of local resellers who need managing to a number. Those sales are won in person, and they stay won because someone keeps turning up.

When the answer is presence

Take an industrial drone at thirty thousand dollars a unit. The buyer wants to watch it fly, ask what happens to it in wind, see the payload swapped, and hear how a repair works when the aircraft sits two thousand kilometres from the factory. Procurement then wants a local reseller holding stock, answering the phone in the local language, and standing behind the warranty.

Every one of those steps happens in person, in a territory, with someone the buyer can call again. That is a director's work: the demonstrations, a reseller network across several markets, and the discipline that keeps both moving. The arithmetic at the top of this page is what that presence costs a company building it alone.

Where this differs from a search firm

A recruiter can read a CV. Judging whether someone will actually sell your product in Jakarta takes someone who has sold there. We sell in these markets ourselves, which is why we can tell a real regional network from a claimed one, and why we know what to ask on the second call.

A recruiter is paid when the placement is made, and their interest ends there. Ours starts there. We expect to be working with you on this region for years, across other markets and other work, so putting the wrong person in front of you would cost us the relationship that matters.

The people we put forward are a small group we have worked with for a decade or more. We introduce someone only where we would take their call ourselves.

The arrangement also ends the way it started, by agreement. A director works on notice, so where the market turns out wrong or the fit is poor you stop, and the cost stops with it. Ending an employment contract in these markets costs a good deal more, and in some of them it takes months.

Companies planning a regional presence tend to budget country by country, and arrive at a headcount figure that stops the project before it starts. The unit is wrong.

Working sales territories in Asia-Pacific follow commerce, and commerce crosses borders. A director based in Singapore, selling in Mandarin and English with live accounts in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Hong Kong, holds four markets credibly, because the buyers, the channels and the commercial customs overlap across them.

Three markets sit outside that grouping. Thailand runs on its own commercial logic and its own language, and the markets a Bangkok director extends into naturally sit beyond the seven we name. Japan asks for someone based there, selling in Japanese, where regional seniority alone falls short. Australia behaves like a Western market and reads as the easy one, which is its own trap.

So a company wanting the whole region needs four people, against the seven a country-by-country budget produces. Most briefs want three or four markets, which usually resolves to one director, sometimes two.

Part of what you buy is that judgement: which markets one person genuinely holds, and which deserve their own. It is expensive to get wrong in both directions. Too thin and the pipeline stays empty; too many hires and the regional business spends its life clearing its own cost.