In 2022 we were hired to find out whether the region would buy online merchandising at all.
The product solves a problem brand managers can see in thirty seconds. Their own product page on a retailer's site is wrong: old imagery, missing specifications, a competitor's banner running above it, and nobody inside the brand is measured on fixing it.
The difficulty in this market was ownership. The person who feels the pain is a brand or e-commerce manager. The person who can authorise a platform is usually two levels up and in a different country. Almost every meeting turned on finding out which of the two we were sitting with.
What we did
Eight months into consumer brands, their regional distributors and the retailers themselves. 136 meetings booked, 102 confirmed held, 114 companies met the product.
Unilever, Nestlé, Procter and Gamble, Henkel, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt, Kraft Heinz, L'Oréal and Mondelez on the FMCG side. Samsung, Huawei, Panasonic, Dyson, Bose, Canon, Electrolux, Haier, Midea, TCL, Xiaomi, HP and Lenovo in electronics. The retailers and groups that sell them: noon, Sharaf DG, Lulu, Landmark, Jumbo, Emax, Extra, Virgin Megastore, Apparel Group, Chalhoub, Al Shaya.
Gitex, and the moment quantity stopped being the point
October 2022, the client took a booth at Gitex Global in the Sheikh Maktoum hall. Rather than wait for stand traffic, we ran an invitation campaign into our own database in the fortnight before and filled the week with booked meetings. A trade show is a room full of your buyers with nowhere to go, and it is the cheapest meeting slot in the calendar if somebody does the work in advance.
Six weeks later we told the client to stop paying us for volume.
The screening phase had done its job: the market said yes, the segments were mapped, and four opportunities had separated themselves from the rest, including a regional appliance manufacturer, a global power-tool brand and a distributor in Abu Dhabi whose implementation had already started. Our proposal was to move one of our people from booking meetings to owning those four accounts through to a signature, with an SDR feeding him, weekly reporting into the client's CRM and their own product training for our man.
Along the way our rep noticed something about how the client's own deals actually closed, and asked them directly: is this how it works here, everyone in the room at the first meeting and the decision taken on the spot. It was, for the distributor segment. That single observation reshaped how meetings were set for the rest of the engagement.
What it shows
The honest end of a screening engagement is telling the client that screening is over. Volume is the right instrument when nobody knows the market yet, and the wrong one the moment four names on the list are worth more than the other hundred and ten. An agency that cannot say that out loud is selling meetings, not business development.