The playbook we borrowed, and the three tactics that survived Dubai
Our first tactics playbook was lifted almost wholesale from an American podcast. Most of it worked. The parts that did not failed for reasons worth writing down.
The first sales playbook this company ever wrote is dated March 2023 and it is not really ours. It is a condensed set of tactics from 30 Minutes to President's Club, the podcast Nick Cegelski and Armand Farrokh run, arranged into the order in which a rep meets them: prospecting, discovery and demo, closing, then process and mindset. The credit line is at the bottom of the document, where it belongs.
We are not embarrassed by that. An agency with four reps and eleven months of trading should not be inventing a sales methodology. It should be finding the best one written down anywhere, running it honestly, and paying attention to the places where it breaks against the market in front of it.
Here is what broke, and what did not.
What survived
Preparation as a time block. Get the research done before the calls start, then call in an unbroken run. The document says forty dials in sixty minutes. The number is optimistic here for reasons below, but the principle, that research and dialling are different activities and should not be interleaved, is the single most useful habit we have ever given a new rep.
Being disarmingly blunt. In a market with a lot of formal correspondence, a rep who says plainly why he is calling stands out. This travels perfectly. It travels better here than at home.
One problem per sequence phase. Do not sell everything in the first email. Take one problem, work it for two or three touches, then change the subject line and take the next one. Almost every failed campaign we have inherited from a client was a single message about seven benefits, sent eight times.
What needed rebuilding
The triple. The playbook says open every sequence with an email, a social touch and a cold call. Correct in principle, wrong in composition for this region. Here the third channel is WhatsApp, not LinkedIn, for a large part of the buying population, and for some industries it is the only channel that gets an answer at all. Our sequences now route through it, and our reporting counts it. A playbook written for a market where everyone lives in their work inbox needs a translation layer before it lands in one where the decision maker's phone is the office.
Forty dials an hour. This assumes direct lines. A meaningful share of Gulf enterprise numbers reach a switchboard, and a switchboard is a conversation, not a dial. The honest local version is fewer dials and a plan for the gatekeeper, which is why a full session of our later curriculum is spent on exactly that.
The upfront contract about pricing. The tactic is to agree early that pricing comes later in the process. In a region where a first meeting can end with a direct question about cost from someone senior enough to ask it, deferring twice reads as evasion. We kept the structure and lost the second deferral.
The part nobody tells you about borrowed playbooks
A borrowed playbook creates a specific failure mode: reps perform the tactic instead of using it. You can hear it on a recording. The permission opener arrives word for word, the "typically" question is deployed with the emphasis from the podcast, and the prospect can tell that a script is being executed at him.
The fix is not to stop borrowing. It is to make the team rewrite each tactic in their own words before they are allowed to use it, and to collect the objections the tactic produces in this market rather than the ones it produced in Chicago. That is where our product hour came from, eighteen months later, and it is why every objection in our library is one of our own reps actually heard.
Borrow the structure. Write the words yourself.