How can a small offshore development company find companies/software sales people to sell their services in the US/UK?

a) You can hire a person (location immaterial) and link his compensation with the business that he will bring in. b) Align with channel partners, who will get the business for you from your target geographies at a commission c) Use social media to popularize the services offered by you and ask your contacts if they can given some references

Selling is all about approach (and inspiring people has its place too. Inspire me to work with you). If you can't afford to hire a sales team or independent sales contractor, then you would do good to outline a viable approach to your target market. Let's take a look at a cold approach vs a warm approach. (personally I don't think a cold approach to sales really holds any value these days | effort vs close rate) Cold Approach: You go on Linkedin, People Per Hour, Odesk, Pick Crew, StackOverflow, etc., heck maybe even buy a list of leads (not suggested) and find the companies that are looking for your matching criteria of developers or designers to work on a project (full time, part time, on location, whatever). You then locate the name of these companies or the name of the people in charge of acquiring expertise for the aspects of these projects, locate contact information and make a call to these companies/ people to introduce yourself. Of course, you will have researched the company and be knowledgeable in the area they need fulfilled. You may or may not get through to the right person. When you do, you talk with them about their requirements for the project, you ask what difficulties they have run into on the project and what their ultimate goal of the project is. The conversation may or may not get very far with this approach. In fact, the cold approach is heavily reliant on numbers, so you might as well spare the time in researching and focus on hit or miss numbers. If you make 100 calls, you can expect to actually speak to the correct person about 1/4 of the time, out of those 25 conversations, likely 50% will not be interested. So, that leaves you 12.5 potentially interested leads to try and close. (This is an estimate. Could be higher, could be lower but for sake of numbers.) Closing web development and design projects, will not be a one call close, 99.9% of the time at least. This means that you need to first successfully pitch those 12.5 leads with potential interest, capture as much information from them as possible and then schedule a follow up meeting to gather more information\continue your pitch to close the deal. This could go on over the course of days, weeks or months. Likely the close rate will be near 1-3% with this approach over a period of time. Warm Approach: My favorite. The warm approach is more effective. The numbers do not need to be as high and the close rate can be optimized, ideally up to a 50% close rate. How do you get there? Good question and you may want to ask yourself, what is my reputation, who knows who I am, who are my previous clients (plays a role), who is in my network and if I don't have a network who should I contact? The warm approach is all about being known before you reach out to a potential lead/client. That lead should at least know your name, better yet they should expect your call. Now you need to become known if you are not. Reach out to previous clients to ask for referrals, create a Linkedin group in your niche area to share useful material, send a newsletter to your subscriber list (if you have one) and have your previous clients write reviews for you. Do all of this while targeting the companies and people that need your service. Develop those channels over time to become a long term lead channel. It does take time but in due time you will see the effect of a warm approach snowball into quality leads and you will not need to struggle with explaining who you are or what you are capable of. With the right people following and learning from you ahead of time, a simple call and reference to your name is all it takes to spark a quality conversation. The sales pressure is then eliminated. In its basic form a warm approach is marketing yourself a bit before initiating contact, making sure that your name is known ahead of time. If you are new to the market and building up your portfolio, remember sometimes it pays to take a hit and find out what the market will pay for your service. Increase your pricing accordingly for future contracts. Give a little to take a lot in marketing value. Developing a sales channel and client list is always an investment of both time and money. It is starting out right that is important. Developing long term, quality channels and approach. I always say "educate first and sell last." Hope that helps. Also, try to stay away from channels like Odesk, Freelancer and Elance. 90% of the time it is just people looking for the cheapest service they can find and quality design/development and process has its price. StackOverflow, PickCrew, BlurGroup and a few others filter out unrealistic projects a lot better.

Hi, thank you for requesting my answer. You mentioned that you are good in analytics, product development, and in inspiring people. On the other hand, you are not good in sales. Moreover, you mentioned you cannot afford a full-time sales person in the US, but you do not wish to settle with low-cost/short-term projects on Odesk and Elance, now Upwork. Let me commend you though, that you genuinely want to deliver real value. Have you ever thought of hiring an offshore firm to do cold calling for you? Please allow me to introduce http://72solutions.com.ph/, a well-established lead generation service provider located in the heart of Iloilo City, Philippines - dedicated to lead generation, appointment setting, data profiling/cleanup, and outbound marketing. And, like you, we also aim to deliver value to our clients. Should you be contemplating on costs, please allow us to process a no obligation quote for you, kindly click: http://72solutions.com.ph/get-a-free-quote/

If I were you, I would use my personal connections first of all. Since you have been in the midst on the IT industry for a while, I suppose, you much have established some network.http://angel.co/, LinkedIn and Stackoverflow can generated the leads as well. Don't forget to attend the tech events, especially those ones which might be attractive for overseas customers. Networking can further lead to new projects.