In 2025 we were hired to find companies at exactly the right moment in their growth.
ERP is the least impulsive purchase in business software. Nobody wakes up wanting one. A company moves when its current system has visibly stopped coping, and not a quarter before.
That makes the qualifying question unusually precise, and unusually easy to get wrong. A finance director will happily take a meeting about NetSuite. Whether that meeting is worth anything depends entirely on whether he is shopping or browsing.
What we did
Four months into finance leadership across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. 50 meetings booked with 32 companies.
Heads of Finance, chief executives, founders and project management leads at fintechs, banks, logistics operators, recruitment platforms and manufacturers. Wio Bank, Starlinks, Jeeny, Algoriza, Nymcard, Aafaq, Neuron, GulfTalent and Rassco in Saudi Arabia.
Two sentences that halved the wasted meetings
The client's guidance arrived in the working chat and it was unusually exact.
On the competitive picture: "Zoho is not like-for-like with NetSuite. Zoho is in the same class as Odoo. Customers only consider NetSuite if they have outgrown their Zoho or Odoo." And then the test, written out in full: if a prospect is actively looking to replace what they have with something comparable, keep the meeting. If they only want to compare prices, it will not yield an opportunity.
Later, the same principle stated harder: a company not actively looking for an ERP is not the profile at all, and belongs in nurture until its management gives someone a mandate.
That is the most useful thing a client can give an outbound team, and it is rarer than it should be. It converts a vague target list into a binary question a rep can ask on a first call.
The rep who found a market rule
One of ours came back with something nobody had briefed: the Government of Abu Dhabi had rolled out Oracle Fusion, which meant Abu Dhabi government entities were effectively locked to it.
The client confirmed the implication went further than the tooling. As a solution partner they were not permitted to pursue government contracts anyway. An entire category came off the target list that week, on the strength of one rep asking a question on a call and bothering to report the answer.
A note on the calendar. Finance leaders in this market travel, and ERP evaluations move at their pace, not ours. Meetings in this engagement were rescheduled constantly, and one prospect stood a meeting down because they had decided to renew Zoho for another quarter. That is the shape of enterprise ERP selling, and it is better understood than fought.
What it shows
For a considered purchase, timing beats targeting. Get the client to write down the difference between a buyer and a browser, in one sentence a rep can use on the phone, and let the calendar move when the buyer needs it to.