In 2023 we were hired to sell corporate training to people who buy corporate training for a living.
Learning and Development is a hard room. The buyer has sat through more vendor pitches than anyone in the building, has an incumbent e-learning platform, and can recite the engagement statistics that justify keeping it.
The product's advantage was that it does not describe well and demonstrates brilliantly. Nobody buys a business game from a slide. They buy it after they have played one.
What we did
Nine months into the largest employers in the Emirates. 93 meetings booked, 69 confirmed held, 88 organisations met the product.
Al Futtaim, Landmark, DAMAC Properties, Azadea, Jetex, Damas Jewellery, DEPA Group, EuroChem, Yokogawa, Instashop, Jeebly, Abu Dhabi Customs, Abu Dhabi Government entities and Emirates College for Advanced Learning. Heads of Learning and Development, regional trainers, and in several cases entire L&D teams.
The meeting that books the next meeting
The measure of a good first meeting here was never the meeting. It was whether the buyer went and got their colleagues.
That kept happening. One property developer's L&D lead sent back a calendar invite that included the entire Learning and Development team. A government buyer said the games were interesting and asked to reconvene once her people could attend. A jewellery group's senior regional trainer came back wanting detail on leadership programmes for two seniority levels and on-site delivery. A logistics firm asked for a second session on their own initiative.
Our reps worked the room around the buyer rather than the buyer alone. When two prospects turned out to have moved to the same institution and now worked together, one was put on hold until the other meeting had happened, so the two conversations would not collide. When rain flooded parts of Dubai, the client asked us to reconfirm every call that day rather than assume, and we did.
The clearest signal came from a rejection. One buyer declined and explained why: they already ran facilitated and simulated games, and their engagement rate was above ninety per cent. That is a good no. It tells you the category is proven and the only question is displacement, which is worth more to a vendor than a polite maybe.
What it shows
When a product demonstrates better than it describes, the entire job of outbound is to earn the demonstration and then get the right people into it. Count second meetings, not first ones. And take the reasoned rejections seriously, because a buyer who tells you their engagement rate has just told you the bar.