One of the common mistakes I see Australian (and other incoming) startups make is "hiring/setting up a sales person in SF".
It seems like a highly leveraged thing to do. Surely someone in-market, full-time, with sales experience should do 10x.
But you learn so much in the sales process. If you have someone remote, new and purely incentivized on sales you lose much of that information.
Quite often the sales person "fails". The company notches it up to being the wrong person, fires them and tries again. However, more often it's the product, the positioning, so many other things.
Really depends on your business, but getting on a plane is the easy solution. It's relatively cheap to fly AU-US nowadays.
If it's a bigger deal, you can probably justify it. Or you stack smaller deals in to one 2-4 week trip.
Sounds inefficient, but you can pack a lot in - plus you'd be surprised how convincing getting on a plane and flying around the world to a customer is. "I'm coming in from Australia" is also a great door-opener.
Doesn't work in all businesses - but for a lot of B2B it is effective.
You can’t sell remotely from Australia via a US sales team. You either sell directly from Australia (with all the downsides this involves) or you move the management team to the USA.
The third option is to acquire a US competitor, let them sell your product into the US market, and make sure they have the same executive decision making power as the team in Australia
Yes - I am actually considering doing this right now. The difficulty is the massive mismatch in valuation between Australian and US companies makes this difficult.
It seems like a highly leveraged thing to do. Surely someone in-market, full-time, with sales experience should do 10x.
But you learn so much in the sales process. If you have someone remote, new and purely incentivized on sales you lose much of that information.
Quite often the sales person "fails". The company notches it up to being the wrong person, fires them and tries again. However, more often it's the product, the positioning, so many other things.