Software Business in the Middle East

This post of Max Kraynov reminds me one meeting some time back with a guy, who’s decision maker in one of the large healthcare organizations in UAE. We met and exchanged our business cards. I explained what I wanted and he asked many questions. While he was listening, he used my business card as a toothpick – really, he was picking in his frontal and even masticatory teeth! Well, I didn’t care much about it as long as I got a help from his side. I just wondered from what village in the middle of Jungle this guy came from.

This comes to the entire issue of how people run business here. Some points from my experience comes here.

Replies on E-mails

It happens pretty rare that you get replies on your e-mails. If you want to send your proposal to the potential customers, I think this is the most stupid idea. You’re simply wasting your time. People usually read their e-mails, but reply very rarely. Sometimes you will get reply after several days or even weeks.

In case you already have deals with particular companies, they will answer your e-mails of course, as you are already in business with them. But otherwise you would expect to get no answer and be prepared to make a follow up call.

Company E-mails

I think the majority of people in UAE use their personal e-mails on Yahoo or Hotmail for communication in their daily work. It is normal to see private e-mails on their business cards, even if they work for Ministry of Health or for a large company.

Importance of Personal Meeting

The most important way to communicate is to meet people. Phone calls work fine, but just for making appointments. We have a potential customer in Saudi Arabia now. They saw the program and they run the full trial with it. They said they liked the software and most likely they will want to get it for all their doctors. They said they liked numbers in the proposal. But they also said they wouldn’t move forward with the decision until they meet with us face to face.

Another example – our customer in Fujairah (this is another Emirate in UAE in about 100 km from Dubai). It is small pharmacy with one computer. They wanted to buy our program but they also wanted to meet before. So you go there just to sell software with price of $135.95.

Importance of Company Web Site

It seems like nobody really cares if your company has a proper web site. It sounds odd. We spent much time making our company web site, and then I was surprised when it did not have any value as people here used to make their impressions from meeting face to face with you. Probably our web site helped us just to confirm to our customers that we’re real company with real contact details, but I am not sure that anybody from our customers has ever visited our web site.

Instead, this site helped us to get some partners and very interesting contacts from Europe and USA.

This thing is going to be changed soon. More and more customers ask us where they could read about our product on the Internet. Sorry, nowhere yet. But the upgrade is on its way.

Business Cards

As already said, folk sometimes have no idea what they would do with your business card when they are sitting in front of you. It happened to me only once to see how my business card is used as a toothpick, but pretty often you might see your card left on the table after the meeting.