The regional hire isn't the problem

When APAC results disappoint, the first casualty is usually the regional hire.

It's a pattern I've seen more than once. A founder brings in a strong local marketing or sales person, hands them the global playbook, and waits for pipeline. Six months later the numbers are flat. The hire gets the blame. The playbook doesn't.

The person is almost never the problem. Marketing was set up to run independently of how sales actually works in-market, and in APAC that gap costs more than it does anywhere else.

Why the gap is wider here

Sales cycles in Indonesia or Japan run months longer than the global model assumes. A playbook built around a thirty- or sixty-day cycle doesn't map onto a market where trust has to be built before a deal moves at all.

Relationships also carry more of the load than collateral does. A good one-pager can support a deal. It rarely opens one. In much of APAC the introduction, and the relationship behind it, matters more than whatever content follows.

Then there's the feedback loop between what marketing produces and what sales needs on the ground. In most companies I've worked with, it doesn't exist. Not because anyone decided against building one. Because no one built one at all. HQ ships a campaign, sales works with whatever lands, and nobody closes the loop on whether it moved a deal forward.

A longer cycle. A relationship-led process. No feedback loop. Put those together and it's not surprising a global playbook underperforms in-market, however well it works elsewhere. The regional hire is operating inside a system that was never built for the market they're selling into.

What the companies that get traction do differently

In the companies where APAC does generate real pipeline, marketing and sales talk regularly and specifically, from the start. Not a quarterly business review. An ongoing exchange where sales tells marketing what's actually happening in deals, and marketing adjusts on that basis rather than on assumptions carried over from HQ.

The regional hire has a clear mandate in that setup. They know what sales needs at each stage of a cycle that looks nothing like the one in the playbook, and they adapt in real time instead of waiting for HQ to sign off on a localised campaign that was already six months old when it landed in their inbox.

That's a structural difference, not an effort one. The regional hire in a company that gets this right isn't working harder than the one in a company that doesn't. They're working inside a system built to use the market knowledge they already have.

The question worth asking before you hire

The hire you brought in, or the one you're about to, probably knows your market better than anyone else in the business. That's usually why they were hired in the first place.

The real question is whether you've built the conditions for them to act on that knowledge. Is there a structured way for what they learn in-market to change what marketing produces? Does sales have a direct line to shape messaging, or does everything travel back through HQ first? Is the playbook a starting point to be adapted, or a fixed asset to be delivered against?

If most of those answers are no, flat pipeline numbers in six months won't say much about the hire. They'll say the system was set up to fail regardless of who was running it.

Before assuming the person is the problem, it's worth asking whether the structure around them ever gave them a real chance.

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nsoffe@kairomarketing.com

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