Why Your First Regional Hire Fails in Month Nine

Month Nine

By the time it becomes a conversation, it has already been true for a quarter.

The pattern is consistent enough to set your watch by. The first quarter is the honeymoon: learning the ropes, learning the region, working out how things actually get done here. Meeting whatever partners exist, doing the rounds, following up on whatever cases were already open. Nobody expects revenue and nobody is looking for it.

The second quarter is the build. New prospects, quotations going out, a pipeline being assembled and then vetted. And somewhere near the end of it, the hire can see the writing on the wall. Not because they have failed at anything, but because they can now see how long the buying process actually takes, and they can see the number on their plan, and the two do not meet.

They know in month six. The company finds out in month nine.

That three-month gap is not dishonesty. It is what happens when the only evidence anybody has agreed to look at is revenue, and revenue is the last thing to arrive. So the hire carries it privately through a quarter — reforecasting, reworking, hoping one deal accelerates — and head office learns about it when the first-year number is close enough to be arithmetic rather than forecast.

Then the questions start, and they are all the wrong questions. Is it the person? Is it the market? Was the plan too aggressive? Should we be doing something else?

The failure did not happen in month nine. It happened at the offer stage, in a conversation nobody had.

The Profile Is Not the Problem

Look at how the hire was chosen and there is very little to criticise.

Vendors recruit from the channel or from other vendors. They look for someone slightly senior and mature, because this person will be operating alone with minimal supervision and the company knows it. They look for a contact list, a track record of carrying a number in this region, and evidence of having done it before.

Every one of those is a genuine qualification. Companies go looking for the best candidate in the market and they pay accordingly — better than market salary, sometimes equity. The intent is right and the money is real.

None of it is the job.

Take the contact list, which is usually the deciding factor. In practice it is a foot in the door and better than nothing. It gets you a meeting with someone who will listen. But a relationship built in one context does not transfer to another, and the people who were once eager to see you now see the meeting as a cost. The senior person who used to take your call asks you to try again next week.

What survives that transition is personal relationship rather than business relationship — the handful of people who will go out of their way because of who you are rather than what you were carrying. That list is much shorter than the one on the CV, and no interview process measures it.

Two Different Jobs

The gap between the profile and the job is not a matter of degree. They are two different occupations that happen to share a title.

One converts demand that already exists. Enquiries arrive from people who know what you do. Tenders appear on a portal or in the inbox. Your job is to respond well, qualify hard, and win more of them than the competition. That is a genuine skill and the market pays a premium for it.

The other creates the conditions in which demand can be found at all. There is no inbound. There is no portal to watch, because the specification that will become next year’s tender is being written right now, in a meeting you have not been invited to, by people who do not know your category exists.

Which means the first year is not selling. It is mapping how a purchase actually happens in this market — who identifies the problem, who designs the solution, who writes the specification, who bids, who carries the risk, who installs it and who supports it afterwards. That map is the year-one deliverable, and building it does not look like selling to anybody watching from head office.

The hire is also an unknown, personally and corporately, and has to educate their own network about what they now do and what this company can offer, before any enquiry stream exists to be managed.

Both jobs are hard. Only one of them is on the offer letter.

What Was Not in the Offer Letter

Here is the part that never gets said out loud, and it is the part that decides the outcome.

There is no receptionist to screen the calls. There is no assistant to book the meetings. The business card no longer opens the door — you open it yourself, and often you do not.

Rejection is fair game. The office, if there is one, gets opened by the hire, and the bills get paid by the hire, and the lights get kept on by the hire, and the selling happens in whatever is left. Head office does not always understand this, or appreciate it. They got you in; now deliver.

Set that against the life the candidate is leaving. In the previous role they were a top producer. The company looked up to them. Their calls were screened, their meetings were arranged by someone else, someone drove them there. Partners were eager to please and keen to stay in their good books.

Now they begin from zero, alone, and the same partner does not take the call.

I have hired a lot of salespeople over fifteen years and the first thing I told every one of them was that this would be the hardest job they would ever do — and that if they got past six months they would be there for a long time. That has held. In fifteen years at Prysm exactly one person left for performance reasons, and he went of his own accord at around six to eight months. Everybody else lived the start-up life and took the rewards that came with it. The people who eventually left, left because of restructuring, and have gone on to build first-hire lives elsewhere.

Which tells you the profile was never the problem, and neither was the calibre of the people. What separates the ones who stay is that they find the thing worth doing. It is a kind of creation. Free of the structures they came from, doing it their own way, the work stops being a job and becomes something closer to a business of their own — and it consumes them accordingly.

That has to be paid for properly, and not only in money. Better than market salary, real incentive, equity where it is possible, and above all an operating freedom that a normal role does not offer. But the freedom is only a reward if the person wanted it. Sold as a promotion, it is an abandonment.

The Arithmetic Nobody Ran

Now put a first-year revenue target against the buying process.

On major projects in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, specifications and budgets begin taking shape four or five years before anything reaches a formal tender.

A twelve-month revenue target does not cover one procurement cycle. It covers part of one, viewed from the outside.

That is the arithmetic, and almost nobody runs it before the offer goes out. The target is usually set the way targets are always set — a market size, a share assumption, a number that makes the headcount approvable. It is a budgeting exercise wearing a plan as a costume.

None of which means year one should be unmeasured. It means the measure has to be something that exists in year one.

What a first hire can actually produce, and should be held to, is qualified pipeline by the end of the second quarter and first conversions by the third. That sequence matters for two reasons, and the second is the one people forget. The first is your own sanity — it tells you whether this is working while you can still do something about it. The second is that it is the evidence head office needs in order to keep funding the region. Support and resources do not continue on faith, and a hire who cannot show progress in the only currency the centre understands will lose the argument long before the revenue question is settled.

Revenue does belong in the frame, but further out. By year one or year two, depending on the business, the regional operation has to justify its cost. If it cannot, it will not fly, and no amount of good intent changes that. What is unreasonable is asking year one to prove it.

The company owes something here too. It should state clearly what it wants from the region before the hire arrives — the vision, the horizon and the resources it is prepared to commit. Before I joined, I built a three-year plan with the resources it would require and presented it to the chief executive. That conversation is worth having in whichever direction it flows. What is fatal is when neither side has had it and both assume the other has.

The Compensation Guarantees the Behaviour

Sales compensation is fixed plus variable, and for a new hire the variable is usually guaranteed for around three months, after which they float.

Apply that unmodified to a market with no pipeline and it pays for exactly one behaviour: chase whatever moves fastest. Which is almost never the work that builds the position, because the work that builds the position — the specification meeting, the consultant relationship, the partner who will matter in three years — produces nothing this quarter and nothing next.

There are two corrections and they work together.

The first is to extend the support. Six months rather than three, and where it can practically be implemented, pay the variable in year one against activity and leading indicators that are clearly defined in advance rather than against revenue that cannot exist yet.

The second is more important and rarely designed in: make the variable recoverable. The year-one earnings a builder gives up should be recoverable later, when the deals they built actually land. That single provision changes the hire’s entire orientation. It lets them build with conviction, knowing the results will come and that when they come the earnings come with them, in one piece.

I have watched people make more than they ever imagined once the big deals finally happened. Not one of those deals would have existed if the person had spent year one optimising for the quarter.

What Head Office Never Sends

The basics usually arrive. It is what sits just above the basics that decides whether the year works.

In my own case travel was never a problem and there was a demonstration unit — but nobody told me whether I was allowed to move it around. I moved it, and got the results. Technical support was always thin, so I learned the product myself, well enough to write technical documents and produce designs. Had I waited for someone else to do it, my customer would have waited too.

Money for anything discretionary ran on approval cycles. We fought for the big-ticket items — trade shows and the like — and got them. For the smaller things we leaned on partners to spend.

But the scarcest resource was never money. It was decision rights, and those are not allocated.

There is a way to build that credibility and it is entirely mechanical. Do not bring management a problem. “This has happened, what should I do” makes you a drain on senior time, however senior you used to be.

Bring the decision instead. This has happened. We can do A, B or C. A gets us blacklisted. B probably does not. C costs this much and prequalifies us for the next three years. Given what is at stake I recommend C. That is an easy yes, and every easy yes buys you a little more room the next time.

The reporting line matters more than most companies think. The higher it sits, the more autonomy comes with it. I reported initially to the second in command and later directly to the chief executive, and there was a weekly cadence across every region where resource and approval blockages were raised in the open. The value of it was not the approvals. It was that nothing festered. A request was approved or it was not, we knew which by the end of the week, and we moved.

That same call did something else worth copying. With every region on it, ideas crossed — what was working somewhere else, what had been tried and abandoned — and everybody could hear the actual depth behind each region’s numbers. It costs time. Run properly, it is the cheapest oversight a company can buy.

The Hire You Should Probably Make First

The standard sequence is a salesperson, then support once volume justifies it. It is backwards more often than it is right.

The ideal, if you can find it, is one person who can sell and handle the technical conversation. Where that is not available — and usually it is not — technical support is the more critical of the two. A salesperson without it is blocked constantly and invisibly.

Our own first local employee was a support engineer, brought from the research team, hired before any salesperson. Half the team was support. In a market with no references, that ratio is not an operational choice. It is the sales strategy.

The objection is that this only applies to hardware, where something has to be installed. It does not. Technical clarification is a gating factor in every category. If a clarification worksheet comes back with a proposal and does not go out again in time, or a technical session has to happen in the customer’s working hours and does not, the deal is damaged regardless of what you sell. A company with regional ambitions has to meet those deadlines exactly — and should never expect a customer to move into its own time zone. At Prysm our chief executive took calls at three in the morning to sit in the customer’s working day.

So when does the salesperson become the right first hire? When the person you are hiring feels like they own the business and own the outcome — wins and losses both. Not when the market looks ready. When the candidate does.

What I Got Wrong

I made one hire that did not work, and it was not the hire’s fault.

The profile was right. The contacts were right. The industry background was right, the track record was good, and the person was genuinely pleased to be joining. Six to eight months in, he told me plainly that he did not believe he could deliver, and that he had another offer he could not turn down. He was honest about it and he was right to go.

What had gone wrong was expectation. He had arrived believing that, as in his previous roles, projects would start arriving once he did. They did not, and nothing in the hiring process had prepared him for the possibility.

That is when I understood that the interview needs to run in the opposite direction from the way everyone runs it.

Now I would paint the worst possible picture first. Describe every hardship of a first hire — the empty inbox, the door that does not open, the partner who does not call back, the months with nothing to show — and only then describe the vision. Then ask the candidate for a thirty-sixty-ninety day plan, and tell them directly that this is not a comfortable job, and that with their profile they could be selected anywhere.

If they still want it after that, you have a builder and you have their buy-in on reality, which is the only thing that survives month six. If the picture puts them off, you have found that out for the price of a conversation.

Two other hiring mistakes are already on the record in this series and I will not retell them. I put the first dedicated resource where my own evidence was strongest rather than where the opportunity was largest, and Saudi Arabia went three years covered by visits before anyone was accountable for it; it became the larger business. And we built a team up to eleven and were cutting back inside eighteen months, which is not prudence, it is a whipsaw.

All three are the same error in different clothing. In each case the decision was made against the evidence that was easiest to see rather than the evidence that mattered.

If You Are About to Make This Hire

The failure is set before day one, which means it is also preventable before day one. Almost all of it is settled in a single honest conversation, and the conversation costs nothing.

The uncomfortable part of all this is that none of it is expensive. It is a plan, a comp structure, a set of decision rights and one honest conversation before the contract is signed.

Companies will spend eighteen months and a senior salary finding out what a two-hour conversation would have told them.

Connektions MEA carries the regional role directly for vendors not yet ready to hire into it. That work is described under Regional Lead.