LAD

In 2022 we were hired by a software group that came back to us twice more.

LAD is the engagement that turned into a relationship. We took their call analytics to market first, and the same group's project management software and voice AI business became separate engagements of their own. Three products, one client, across two and a half years.

The analytics pitch is unusually easy to state and unusually hard to schedule. Every hotel reservations desk and every hospital booking line already records its calls, for compliance. Almost none of them read those recordings. The recordings contain the answer to why bookings are lost, and listening to them by hand is impossible.

What we did

Nine months across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in hospitality, healthcare and retail. 156 meetings booked, 97 confirmed held, 138 companies introduced. It is the third largest engagement in our book by volume.

Hotel groups: Rotana, Jumeirah, Marriott, Hilton, Accor, Radisson, Kerzner, Raffles, Fairmont, Millennium, Rove, FIVE, Emaar Hospitality, Dusit, Centara, Address in Saudi Arabia. Healthcare: Aster DM, Mediclinic, NMC, Medcare, Prime Healthcare, Burjeel, Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City, King's College Hospital, Canadian Specialist, Thumbay, and the Dubai Health Authority. Retail: Landmark's brands, Splash, Max, Babyshop, Redtag, Aldo, Skechers, Rituals, Ajmal Perfumes, Nazih.

Book fifteen to hold ten

The most quoted sentence from this engagement inside our own company is an arithmetic one. For the retail workstream we booked fifteen meetings in order to hold ten.

That ratio is not a failure. It is the operating reality of selling to hospitality and healthcare operations managers, who are the most reschedule-prone buyers we work with, for the simple reason that their day is other people's emergencies. A front-office director will accept a meeting sincerely on Monday and be dealing with a full house or a full ward on Thursday.

The teams that survive this plan for it. The ones that do not, quietly stop booking into the segment and drift towards buyers who are easier to reach and cannot sign anything. We would rather book fifteen.

The second thing this engagement taught us has outlasted the client. Call analytics was the first product we took to market that measured the quality of a sales conversation rather than the quantity, and we now run the same idea on ourselves. Every call our own reps make is recorded, transcribed and scored, and the coaching comes from what the calls actually contain rather than from what a manager remembers. We learned that from selling it.

What it shows

Some segments hold at ninety per cent and some hold at sixty, and the difference is usually the buyer's job rather than the rep's skill. Work out the ratio for the segment, staff the pipeline to it, and stop treating a reschedule as a defeat. And if you ever sell a measurement product, use it on yourself first. The client can tell.