In 2023 we were hired to sell retail technology to corner shops.
Almost every engagement we run ends in a meeting room or a Teams call. This one ended in supermarkets.
Dukkantek sells to independent grocers: the supermarket on the corner, the hypermarket in an industrial area, the family chain with four stores and no head office. These buyers do not take calendar invites from vendors. They are on the shop floor, and if you want twenty minutes you go to the shop floor too.
What we did
Eleven months of outreach into independent retail across the Emirates. 98 meetings booked, 68 confirmed held, 91 retailers met the product.
Supermarkets, hypermarkets and grocery chains across Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. Store managers, operations managers, supervisors and owners. A standing weekly call with the client every Friday at noon Dubai time held the whole thing together, and the engagement was renewed.
Meetings measured in kilometres
The working chat does not read like a sales pipeline. It reads like a delivery route. Meetings were booked at the store, at ten thirty in the morning, with the supervisor who would actually use the thing. One prospect asked our rep to come to the shop to look at the machine and gave only a general email address, so the note back to the client was a warning as much as a booking: he confirmed, but it is a long way to Sharjah and you may not find him.
Two other habits came out of that. Meeting locations went into the calendar invite as a matter of course, because a time without an address is useless when the meeting is in a shop. And when our rep booked a store that turned out to be already in the client's own pipeline, he flagged it himself rather than letting it collide, which set the rule for the rest of the engagement: confirm the account before approaching it.
What it shows
Match the channel to the buyer. Enterprise sequences and calendar invites are worthless against a shop owner who has never taken a vendor meeting in his life, and the right move is to go and stand in the aisle. The metric that matters there is not meetings booked. It is meetings a rep can physically reach in a day.