Software Business in the Middle East

First, I wanted to wrote “I couldn’t”, but then I changed my mind and wrote “I cannot” as I still have a lot of things to learn about how to sell.

While we were working on our demo and then the first version of our product, we thought that the only way to sell it would be the cold calls. I made an experiment calling dozens of doctors. Although we got a very positive feedback that motivated us to move forward, I couldn’t tell those calls was very easy for me to make. The majority of those calls were cold calls when you call somebody you’ve never met before and try to explain your points. It might seem that it’s very easy to make a call – just pick up the phone and call. Yes, it is easy when you call McDonald’s to make an order, but it is absolutely another story when you call somebody to make an order from you.

And one more thing to add – I am not a salesman. I am ordinary geek who’s been programming for many years, and who worked as a manager for the past few years. I got no sales experience at all. I guess this is common for the majority of IT startups.

Finally, I’ve summarize some of the experience I got from all my cold calls.

Duration of Calls

I’ve heard many times from the sales people that you have about 30 seconds to explain your points to somebody. This is approximately the time you have in a lift if you occasionally meet there a person you wanted to talk to.

To start with, I wrote down everything I wanted to tell over the phone to my potential customer, and then I trained myself to make sure my speech was clear and I talked smoothly and not too fast. I got about 45-60 seconds. I didn’t want talking faster, so I cut some of my sentences to make my speech 30 seconds long.

Another good way to train making a cold call is to look at your own reactions and feeling when other people call you – in this case you are the potential customer for them, and they offer you, let’s say, outsourcing to India. This way I understood that even 30 seconds is too long. When I was listening the salesmen who offered me their products, I started getting bored already after 20 seconds. Finally, I made my speech 15 seconds long.

Whom You Talk to

The majority of companies have a secretary who picks up incoming calls. Sometimes I was really surprised how easy it was to get contact details of the person I needed to talk to. But in other cases, there was no way to pass by the secretary as she refused to forward my call forward asking me to send an e-mail instead and explain what I wanted.

Time to time, when you talk, let’s say to Product Manager, you figure out that he is not the decision maker, because the only one who may make decisions is Sales Director. It doesn’t mean that your meeting with the Product Manager is useless – he might help you to convince Sales Director to accept your offer. Very often decision makers delegate the real decision to their staff, and only sign the final official decision.

Making Cold Call Warmer

It is a lot easier to talk to somebody if you have a reference to the third person you both know. It’s amazing how simple it might be to establish contact and good relationships just based on the fact that you came from somebody known to your potential customer.

If you don’t have references, you might use the situation to warm your called call a little. It happened to me several times when I talked over the phone with, let’s say, Mr. Smith and he replied that he wouldn’t be able to help me as it’s not his area, but probably Mr. Black is the right person to talk to. When I then called Mr. Black, I mentioned that I had a discussion with Mr. Smith, and he recommended me talking to you as you are the one who might help me. It makes Mr. Black feel that he got a call from a guy known to Mr. Smith, and hence this guy wasn’t Mr. Nobody from the street.

What is interesting for me, it’s the fact that it hasn’t been particularly difficult to make an appointment over the phone (the goal of cold call is to make an appointment, not to make a sell – although I assume there are guys, who are able to make a sell from the first cold call). Probably, it was easy with making appointments because of the nature of our product, or maybe it’s because of local people mentality to meet face-to-face (we have a potential customer in Saudi Arabia who said they liked our product, but they wouldn’t make any decision to purchase until they meet us face-to-face).

Although I have made hundreds and hundreds cold calls so far, I cannot say it’s very easy for me to make cold call even now. You get some kind of bad feeling inside when you are about to make a cold call. This feeling disappears almost immediately after you start talking. Probably it’s some kind of fear and injection of adrenaline into your veins. This feeling is very similar to what you feel when you come to the boxing ring on the training. You also get this bad feeling in the beginning, but it disappears as soon as you start the fight. And you definitely cannot find any trace of this feeling after you have missed couple of punches

Next time I will talk about the result of all our cold calls and about how we sell our product now.

I could pretend and tell about how smart and cool guys we were finding an excellent solution for our problems. But everything was not so cool, and, to tell more, we had nothing to do with the solution at all. It simply was a contingency or pure luck, I would say. One of those that could change your business or even your entire life.

On one of my endless meetings at that time somebody said he knew a professor from the local medical university, who had been working with the subject of drug database and medical errors for several years. I got a phone number of this professor, and we met already in couple hours.

It was a perfect match. The professor had collected and analyzed drug data for the last five years. His only problem was to find out a way how to organize his data as a computer program. He tried once asking some of the programmers to develop software for him, but they all spoke different language – both parties had issues in understanding medical terminology from one side and computer stuff from another.

We did not have problems with either medical or computer terminology, but we had problems with getting drug data.

At that time I really didn’t figure out how big luck my meeting with the professor was. After a while we decided to work together – the professor would be responsible for medical content of our drug database, and we would drive the technical implementation.

Looking now at our continuous cooperation, I could tell that my new partner keeps doing great job for getting new contacts. He lived in Saudi Arabia for many years working at that time in the only medical university in the Kingdom. His students graduated for 10-15 years back are now working as top executives and decision makers in the official healthcare authorities and large healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia. It means that many doors are opened for us just with one phone call from our professor.

Finally, we got a very good team – one of us got deep medical knowledge, and others had rich technical background. Later, after having many troubles with moving sales forward, I had understood how badly we needed a professional salesman in our startup – in this case we would have just a dream team.

While my partners were developing the prototype, I tried to find out a way how to get information about the drugs registered in United Arab Emirates. It was clear that there would be two major sources of information - pharmaceutical companies that develop and produce drugs and Ministry of Health that is responsible for drug registration before they are allowed to be marketed in the country.

Pharmaceutical Companies

When I was meeting with the pharmaceutical companies, I got two different reactions. Some companies liked the idea and promised to send data about their drugs to us. Probably, those companies looked at our project as one more way to market their products. Other companies said they wouldn’t help us. This reaction was strange to me - we didn’t ask for any technology secrets or know-how, the information we needed was basically from patient leaflets inserted into each and every single drug package. This data are available to every patient who buys the particular medication. In some cases I got impression that those companies were afraid giving any data for public access - probably for some reasons they did not want to give information about all their drugs to one single company as us.

Luckily, the majority of companies said they would give us their data either in format of pdf files or at least as hard copies on papers.

But that never happened. After a while, when I started to make follow up calls to check why we hadn’t got any data yet, I got a reaction that people tried to postpone giving us data. It is kind of local “feature”. If somebody does not want to help you, he would not tell it to you directly like “sorry, but I cannot help”. Instead, that person stops answering your e-mails or phone calls, and if you succeed reaching him over the phone, he would answer you something like “oh, sorry, dear, I got too much stuff to do, but I will send you all data by the next week, don’t worry”. And then nothing happens again.

Finally, there were only 2 companies out of 150 that gave us their data. One of them sent drug information by e-mail, and another one sent a courier with paper materials and CD.

Ministry of Health

Ministry of Health (MOH) was kind of interesting thing to contact to. I learned about two things:

1. They do not keep drug information in electronic format, and I had really hard time to find somebody, who would be able to answer the question if MOH kept any drug data at all. I would understand if somebody from HR Department of MOH couldn’t answer this question, but when Drug Control Department was not able to give me the proper answer, it sounded pretty strange to me. Especially knowing that Drug Control Department of Ministry of Health is responsible for drug registration before the drugs are allowed for marketing and prescribing in the country. I know that MOH was trying to develop kind of Drug Information System since 2003, but the system is far away from being completed till now. Speaking about Ministry of Health from our today’s perspectives, I can say they’re making a lot of improvements nowadays. They got new Minister of Health, and new Executives, so it seams that new management team there is very active. It is good for the community and for us.
2. MOH has a price list of the drugs registered in the country. That was good news, at least we got a way to know what drugs existed on the market and how much each of them costs. This drug price list is available for public, and it is normally updated monthly.

Besides pharmaceutical companies and Ministry of Health I also talked to several large healthcare organizations like Dubai Healthcare City and couple companies that develop Drug Database in USA and Europe.

Dubai Healthcare City told they would be interested to discuss the usage of our drug database as soon as it’s completed. It was a positive point, as they had plans to build around 12 hospitals and around 300 clinics by year 2010.

Companies that develop similar Drug Databases for USA and Europe were First DataBank and CMP Medica. Our idea was that we would probably cooperate with big guys, who are not yet presented in the Middle East. We had a discussion over e-mails with the Sales and Marketing Director of First DataBank, and his conclusion was they would need some time to think and calculate benefits and risks - basically, they wanted to understand if expansion to the Middle East was something they’re interested in.

CMP Medica was slightly more active. They called me a few times from their office in Singapore asking questions about market potential, but finally nothing happened with CMP Medica either.

I did not expect that it would be so difficult to get drug information. Without those data, our project made no sense - drug information is a key point in it. The situation was pretty strange - I saw the real interest from doctors to have such program for this market, but at the same time we had almost no chance to get drug information needed to build the drug database.

To be honest, at that time I started to seriously think about if I really wanted to fight further trying to get the data and keep project running. As an option, I could move back to Sweden and start working at Siemens again and accept the offer to move temporarily to the US office. It was clearly a weakness from my side, but that was what I felt at that time.