Choosing a China Market-Entry Partner: Questions Worth Asking

We're going to do something slightly awkward here. CN1X is a China market-entry partner, so a post about how to vet one is a post about how to vet us. The only way to write it honestly is to include the questions where our own answer is the wrong one — the ones where you should hear "no" from us and go elsewhere. Four of the fifteen below are exactly that. If a vendor gives you a clean, favourable answer to all fifteen, that's worth more suspicion than reassurance.

The short version: the useful questions aren't about capability, because everyone claims capability. They're about ownership (whose accounts and data), evidence (can I see something that exists), mechanism (what specifically changes for a buyer), and boundaries (what you don't do). Ask what happens if it doesn't work, and ask for one thing you can verify without the vendor's help. The answers that should worry you are the ones with no limits in them.

Ownership: whose accounts, whose data, whose customers

• In whose name is every account registered? Accounts opened under an agency's entity are the single most common way brands lose their China presence. If the relationship ends, the followers, the content history and the traffic go with the agency. The answer you want is: in your company's name, with you as the account holder. Get it in writing.
• Who holds the customer relationship and the payment? If the vendor sits between you and the buyer — collecting enquiries into their own inbox, taking payment, holding the customer's contact details — you're renting your own customers. The answer you want is that availability, pricing, payment, confirmation and the customer relationship stay with you.
• What happens to everything if we stop working together? Ask for the specifics: who transfers the account, who holds the login, what happens to the pages, and how long the handover takes. A vendor who hasn't thought about this has never done a handover.

This is also worth checking against what a vendor writes elsewhere. If the pitch says the accounts are yours but the case studies describe the agency "running" the channel, one of the two is wrong.

Evidence: something that exists, not something described

• Can I see a live implementation? Not a deck, not a mockup of someone else's brand — something running that a stranger can open. And ask what exactly they built versus what the client already had.
• Can you build a sample of my product before I commit? One page, one real product of yours, in Chinese. This is the cheapest test available to you: it shows how they handle your actual details, and whether they read your material or guessed.
• Can I speak to a reference customer? ← Here's one where our own answer is no. We don't have client permission to be used as a contactable reference, and we won't hand out a client's contact details without it. That's a real limitation, and if a contactable reference is a requirement for you, it's a legitimate reason to choose someone else. What you should refuse to accept is a vendor who offers a reference and then keeps not producing one.

Mechanism: what specifically changes for a buyer

• Walk me through what a Chinese customer does, step by step, from first seeing us to being confirmed. A vendor who can only answer this in category words — presence, visibility, engagement, funnel — hasn't built it. You want screen-by-screen: they see this, they tap this, this arrives in your inbox, you reply like this.
• Which of those steps are you responsible for, and which are still ours? The interesting gaps are language ("who answers a Chinese message?"), payment ("in what currency, settled how?") and fulfilment.
• What will I be able to measure, and what will that measurement not tell me? Every honest answer here has a limit in it. Source tags tell you which page a visit came from, not the visitor's nationality. Enquiry counts tell you about the people who reached you, not about the ones who never did.

Boundaries: what they don't do

• Do you buy traffic or run ads? ← Our answer is yes, and by our own warning below that is the combination to interrogate. The distinction that matters for you is that converting arrivals and creating them are two different services: if your actual problem is that nobody in China has heard of you, a beautifully built storefront does not solve it. Any vendor should be able to say plainly which of the two they do in-house, and where a vendor claims both — as we do — ask which one they would show you work from first, and whether the same people do both.
• Have you worked in my country and my category? ← Often our answer is no. Category and country matter more than they sound like they do: platform account eligibility, verification documents and permitted business categories all vary by the entity's country and industry. A vendor who has never dealt with your combination should say so and check before promising, rather than after.
• What results will you commit to? The right answer is uncomfortable: nobody can commit to enquiry or booking numbers, and a vendor who does is either guessing or planning to renegotiate later. What they can commit to is output — what gets built, what gets published, in what timeframe, to what standard. Push for commitments on deliverables and refuse them on outcomes.
• How do we talk to each other? ← Our answer is limited: we work in writing. Our team doesn't conduct business by phone in your language; we use written communication and, when a conversation is genuinely needed, a meeting platform where each side speaks their own language and reads translated subtitles. If you need a native-language account manager on a call every week, say so early — that's a real requirement and we're not the right fit for it.

Two questions about the vendor's own honesty

• What have you got wrong recently, and what did you do about it? You'll learn more from this than from any case study. A vendor with no failures either hasn't done much or isn't telling you.
• Show me something in your proposal that isn't in your interest. Every honest scope has at least one: a phase they told you to delay, a service they declined to sell, a cheaper route they pointed out. If everything in the document is an upsell, the document was written for them.

How to read the answers

Two patterns are worth more than the content of any single answer.

Limits are a good sign. Sentences with "not", "only", "we don't" and "that depends on" are the sentences a vendor has actually thought through. Uniformly positive answers mean either inexperience or a sales script.

Consistency across surfaces matters. Compare the email, the website, the case studies and the contract. Marketing copy tends to be written earlier and more enthusiastically than proposals, and the gap between them tells you which one is true. If you find a contradiction, ask about it directly — the response is informative either way.

Where CN1X fits

By our own list above: your accounts and data stay yours, we'll build a sample of one of your real products before you commit to anything, we commit to deliverables and refuse to promise enquiry or booking numbers, we work in writing, we run both the building and the buying of traffic, and we can't currently offer you a contactable reference customer. Some of those are advantages and some aren't — which is roughly the ratio you should expect from anyone answering honestly.

If that trade looks right for what you're trying to do, send us one product and we'll show you what it looks like in Chinese before either of us talks about price. If it doesn't, the list above still works on the next vendor.