Software Business in the Middle East

Today morning I got a call from one company. During the first few seconds, when I was listening the company introduction, I thought this call was another good candidate to answer “Thank you, but no thank you” – the standard answer that has been developed thanks to countless calls from Indian outsourcing companies.

But this call was different, and I think those guys got a brilliant business idea. Basically, they help companies reaching their potential customers. Beauty of this idea is that they do not give you direct phone number of Some Big Boss’s secretary, but they arrange a meeting between you and potential customer’s Chief Information Officer (CIO).

The company organizes the summit and invites about 70 CIOs to participate. They do not only invite CIOs, but they also learn from those C-level managers about current IT needs of their organizations – what solutions they are looking for at the moment, if they think to outsource some of their products, or they’re in need of specific consultant, or anything else.

Then the company invites IT solution providers. Maximum two companies from each business domain are invited. It means if you are in IT outsourcing business, there will be only you and one more company that provides IT outsourcing services.

As IT solution provider you get a list of all CIOs who will participate on the summit, and you may book the meetings with 30 of them during the event. What good with such meetings is that, first of all, you talk to the main decision maker in a potential customer’s organization. From our experience, getting on the meeting with C-level executives in a large company is very difficult task, and it might take you months before you reach that level passing through endless secretaries. The second, you know exactly what any particular CIO is looking for, and you book meetings only with those CIO you can help to.

With all these good stuff, there are also two things that might probably be improved. The summit is three days long. It means that having 30 meetings, you would have 10 meetings each day, and it makes me feel that schedule will be very tight. People might get tired to keep concentrated. Another thing I didn’t like was the price, which is around 30’000 EUR if you are IT solution provider. I didn’t like the price from my small startup company perspective, but I guess if any other company spends hundreds of thousands dollars for marketing each year, they might want to consider rearranging of their marketing budget to be able to participate in this kind of events. From another hand, it means that you pay 1’000 EUR for each meeting – and it is probably not such much money to get a chance meeting with the decision maker of the company, who is looking for a solution you think you can provide. According to the company statistics, those 30 meetings normally end up with 8-12 follow up meetings. So the result is about 30%. I think the most interesting statistics would be to see how many contracts are signed out of those 30 meetings.

What I also liked is the interest from the salesman’s side to answer all my questions even after it became clear for both of us that I wasn’t their customer, at least for this year. I was interested to learn more about this idea – it’s kind of Business Event, but organized completely different way I used to see in Dubai before. The salesman answered all my questions, and I got really positive impression about the company and the event. It is probably a good example of sales making a contact with a potential customer – no matter you don’t get this customer now, you might get him later, even in a few years.

You can learn more about the company on their web site and here you can learn more about the event.