The usual arrangement is modest: one or two people hired locally, an office or no office at all, a call every week and a visit when the calendar allows. It works for a while, then it stalls, and the explanation offered is cultural. Something narrower is at work. The person on the ground holds the relationships, the language and the reading of what a customer meant; you hold the price, the product and the money. Neither half can act alone, and the only thing that keeps the arrangement honest over time is a clear line about which decisions sit where.
What gets delegated, and what never does
Delegate everything that requires being in the room: whom to visit and in what order, how a meeting is opened, which trade fair deserves a stand, how a specification is explained in Chinese to an engineer who will never read your English datasheet, how a complaint is handled in the first hour. Those judgements are better made on the spot, and pulling them back to headquarters turns a salesperson into a translator — a role nobody good stays in for long.
Keep three things, and keep them visibly. The price floor, because a discount granted locally becomes the market reference within weeks and travels between buyers faster than any announcement. The written commitment, because a quotation, a delivery promise or an exclusivity suggested in a meeting will be treated as binding whatever your contract says: the person on the ground proposes, the company signs. And the customer record, because the day that person leaves, the accounts have to still be yours. None of this is distrust. It is the difference between a sales team and a one-person agency trading under your name.
Hierarchy, and what a silence means
The relation to hierarchy is where European managers lose the most information. An instruction from the person who signs the salaries is an instruction, not an opening position. Ask a group « does that seem feasible to you ? » and you will be told yes. That is neither dishonesty nor servility: contradicting your employer in front of colleagues costs the person contradicting something real and gains them nothing, so the objection is not raised. The bad news then arrives late, in writing, after the date it concerned — and from your side it looks like a problem that appeared suddenly, when in fact it was visible to everyone for a month.
What changes it is mechanical rather than cultural. Ask narrow factual questions instead of asking for an opinion: « what did the buyer say when you gave the price ? » rather than « do you think our price works ? ». Ask one person at a time, not the group. React to the first problems reported without anger, because the cost of the next report is set by what happened to the last one. Criticism follows the same rule in reverse: alone, about a specific act, accompanied by what to do next. A reprimand delivered in front of the team does not produce a correction. It produces a quiet search for another job, and you will learn of it through a resignation.
Variable pay does exactly what it is written to do
Variable pay is the most reliable instrument you have and the least reversible mistake you can make. It is reliable because it is read closely, discussed between colleagues and optimised intelligently. It is hard to undo because any correction that lowers somebody's expected pay is experienced as a broken promise, whatever the arithmetic says. So the scheme should be written as if it will be gamed, because it will be — not out of bad faith, but because that is what an incentive is for.
- Commission on orders signed. Produces signatures. It also produces discounts, promises made outside the contract, and orders from customers whose ability to pay nobody checked. Paying on cash collected rather than on orders booked removes most of that in one line.
- Commission on volume alone. Pushes whichever product is easiest to sell and starves the one you are trying to establish. If a new line matters, weight it explicitly: the team will act on the weighting, not on the speech that introduced it.
- A target set without the person. Will be treated as a number from headquarters rather than a commitment, and missed without embarrassment. Agreed quarter by quarter against accounts the person named themselves, it becomes theirs, which is the only state in which a target does any work.
- An uncapped rate on a single account. Feels generous until one deal makes the year, after which the following year is spent protecting that account and nothing new is opened. A separate component for new customers costs far less than rebuilding a pipeline later.
- A discretionary bonus. Read as arbitrary whatever your intention, and discussed between colleagues in detail you will never hear. If you want to reward judgement rather than volume, name the behaviours in advance and pay against them.
One point is rarely said out loud: pay is discussed between colleagues, in detail, and an exception granted to one person is public within the week. This is not a leak to be plugged. It is the normal circulation of information in a small team, and it means a published scale with a few levels does less damage than a series of individual arrangements, each of which looked reasonable on the day it was agreed.
The weekly review that works
- Hold it at the same hour every week and do not skip it. The call is the structure of the week on the other side, and a cancelled call tells the team that what they prepared did not matter.
- Ask for the same short written note before the call, in the same form every time: who was seen, what was said, what is expected next, what is blocked. Written in Chinese if that is faster and translated roughly, rather than not written.
- Go through named accounts, not through activity. « Several visits this week » tells you nothing; « the purchasing manager at the account we have been chasing since spring asked for a sample in a different finish » tells you exactly where you stand.
- Decide something on each call, out loud, and say who does what before it ends. A review that only collects information teaches the team that nothing ever comes back from headquarters, and the notes get thinner accordingly.
- Finish with what they need from you — a document, a price, an answer from the factory — and deliver it before the next call. Your own reliability is what buys theirs, and it is the only authority you have at that distance.
And go in person, regularly, on a rhythm the team can count on. A visit does something no call does: you sit in a meeting you did not organise, you watch which questions the customer asks first, you see whether your product is on the shelf or in the stockroom, and you hear the objection that has been softened in every report for months. The weekly call maintains the arrangement. The visit is where you find out what the market actually says.
The day that person leaves
The dependency builds quietly and nobody decides it. Everything arrives through one person: the customers, the distributors, the translation, the explanation of why a deal slipped a quarter. After a year that person is the market, and you have no independent way to check anything you are told — not because they are lying, but because there is nothing to compare their account with. A single channel produces this on its own, without anyone intending it.
What reduces it is cheap and has to be installed early. A customer record you own, kept current as a condition of the variable pay rather than as a favour, with the names, the history and the contact details in it. A second person, even junior, who also meets customers. Your own visits, where you see the buyer with the intermediary beside you rather than in front of you. And at least one relationship you maintain yourself — a distributor, a key account, the accountant, the lawyer — so that one resignation does not take out your entire line of sight.
When the departure comes, the contacts go too, because they were that person's contacts. A non-competition undertaking exists in Chinese employment law, but it binds an employee and only while it is paid for during the restricted period — and even then it restrains the employee, not the customer, who remains free to buy from whoever turns up. What actually limits the damage is prosaic: the record you kept, a notice period used for a real handover with introductions made face to face, a successor who met the accounts before the departure rather than after, and the fact that the contract, the price and the after-sales were always in your name rather than in the salesperson's. Prepared for, a departure costs a quarter of awkwardness. Unprepared for, it costs the market.
The test is simple, and worth running while the relationship is good rather than in the month it ends. If the person on the ground stopped answering tomorrow, what would you still have? A list of accounts with names, histories and contact details, contracts signed in your own name, a second person who has met some of those buyers — or a market you have never seen for yourself. Build that answer now; it is also what makes the person easier to manage in the meantime.