In 2024 we were hired to run what became the largest outbound programme in our book.
262 meetings booked, from the least glamorous premise in mobile advertising: every app with an ad slot in it already earns something, and almost every publisher believes that something is too low.
Interest was never the problem. The problem is that the publisher has heard from every ad network there is, each of them promising the same lift, and has no cheap way to tell which promise is real. A meeting that ends in "send me a deck" costs him nothing and gets nobody anywhere.
What we did
Sixteen months across the Gulf, Egypt, Pakistan, India and Turkey. 262 meetings booked, 202 confirmed held, 150 companies met the product.
Talabat, Dubizzle, Botim, Breadfast, Nawy and Wego. Al Jazeera Media Network, MBC and Al Arabiya, SRMG, Gulf News and Telecom Egypt. Tamatem, Babil Games and a long tail of studios behind them. Paytm, PhonePe, Flipkart, ShareChat, Reliance Jio, NDTV and The Times Group in India.
Holding 77% at that volume matters more than the volume. 202 held meetings over sixteen months is roughly three a week that someone actually turned up to, in five markets, in a category where the standing offer from every competitor is a deck.
The offer that did the work
Our reps did not open with the network. They opened with the client's arithmetic and a free month.
The material we worked from carried the client's own claims: average revenue per user up 77% in three months, and elsewhere a lift above 50% with retention holding above 30%. Those are the client's published numbers, not ours, and we used them the way a rep should use a vendor claim, as the reason for a test rather than the conclusion of one. Behind them sat the thing that actually opened calendars: the first month ran at zero service fee.
That changes what a first meeting is for. Nobody has to be convinced of anything on the call. They have to agree to a trial that costs them nothing and shows up in their own dashboard in thirty days. It is a much smaller ask, and it is why the hold rate stayed where it did.
The team used the client's own event in Egypt the same way, as a reason to call somebody rather than a thing to sell them. Publishers who would not take a vendor meeting will take an invitation, and an invitation is a conversation with a date attached.
What it shows
When the value of a product is arithmetic, the job of outbound is to get the arithmetic tested, not argued. Find the version of the offer that a buyer can check himself, for nothing, inside a month, and lead with that. Every claim in the deck is worth less than one number the buyer watched appear in his own reporting.