In 2024 we were hired to recruit partners rather than customers.
Nobody displaces a hyperscaler by cold-calling enterprises. The route into a market that is already served is through the companies who build on top of clouds for a living, and who are permanently interested in a platform that gives them better margins, better support or a differentiated story.
That audience is small, technical and sceptical. It is also reachable, which is more than can be said for the enterprise buyers they serve.
What we did
Three months in the UAE, into IT service providers, managed service businesses and software companies. 25 meetings booked, 20 confirmed held, 25 companies introduced.
Bespin Global MEA, CNS Middle East, VaporVM, Mignet Technologies, Scaleable Solutions, TCT, EPM, MDP, Bizzclan, Multi Level Group, CyberSec Consulting, Intapp, Umami E-Learning, zVendo, Yozo.ai, YouCloud Pay, Rasmal and Urtica Smart Solutions.
A meeting we booked became a client of ours
That last name is the reason this short engagement gets a story.
Urtica Smart Solutions was a target on this list, approached in the autumn of 2024 as a potential cloud partner. Within the same season they were a client of ours, and their engagement has its own page.
That is not luck and it is not a coincidence worth boasting about. It is a structural feature of doing this work: an agency running partner recruitment for one client spends its days talking to exactly the kind of company that needs partner recruitment. We meet the market from the inside, several times a week, in twenty sectors at once, and some of those conversations turn around.
It is also the honest answer to how a business development agency finds its own business development. Ours comes from the same place our clients' comes from: a disciplined list, a specific reason to call, and someone on the phone who understood the industry before he dialled.
What it shows
Partner-led entry is the only sane route into a market where the incumbents are entrenched, and the audience is more reachable than the end customer. Do it well enough and the list starts working in both directions.