Stop waiting to hire your export salesperson

You know what you need. Someone who speaks fluent English. Someone who understands export, who can talk to US buyers, chase the right people, and not embarrass the company doing it. Until you find that person, it feels wrong to start. So you wait. You'll do the US market properly once the right hire is in the seat.

That's the responsible instinct. And it is quietly costing you, every month it continues.

Be honest about who you're looking for. A salesperson who is fluent in English. Who understands your product and your industry. Who knows how US buyers think. Who is willing to sit at your factory and spend their days reaching Americans, on American hours, late into your night. Who you can afford, and who will stay.

That person is real, but there are very few of them, and everyone wants them. If you do find one, they cost a lot, and they can leave, taking your whole export effort out of the door with them. So the search drags. One year becomes two. This is the trap: waiting for a rare hire slowly turns into a reason never to start at all.

And while you wait, the buyers are there, and they are willing. More than 8 in 10 say they'll take a meeting with a seller who reaches out at the right time (RAIN Group). Every month you hold out for the perfect person, those meetings are still happening, just for someone else.

Here's the reframe. You've been treating this as a hiring problem: find the one bilingual, export-savvy salesperson, and then begin. But what you actually need isn't a particular person on your payroll. It's a function: steady, proactive outreach to US buyers, in good English, on US hours, kept up week after week.

Once you see it as a function instead of a hire, the problem changes shape. A function can be up and running long before the perfect employee is ever found, and without betting your whole US future on one person who is hard to replace. The question stops being "who do we hire?" and becomes "how do we get this done?"

What this means for you

You don't have to keep waiting to begin. The reason you couldn't find the person was never a failing on your part. The role is genuinely rare, and a single hire is a fragile way to carry a whole market. But the outreach itself doesn't have to wait for that search to finally end.