Software Business in the Middle East

There is a certain kind of customers who for some reasons keep saying they want your product, but nothing happens for months. I was really pissed off yesterday after another meeting with one of our potential customer. Or let me call this group of customers as “Non-Customers” as it’s really unlikely that something will happen with them. The rough history of our discussion with this Non-Customer:

Beginning of August – they heard about us from somebody and asked to come and visit them with the demo.

Middle of August – we had a demo meeting and they asked to send them a proposal about the price to integrate our drug database with their Point of Sale (POS) software in each and every pharmacy.

End of August – they got a proposal.

Beginning of September – they said they plan moving to another POS software and they would need to choose from either MS Navision or Oracle system. The selection and migration would take them another 6 months so they asked us to wait until they are ready.

After one week (!!!) they called and said they decided to keep their current POS and asked us to send them a contract.

Middle of September – we sent them a contract. That was Ramadan time, so nobody really worked very hard. Their General Manager (and the owner at the same time) was not available until middle of October.

Middle of October – they kept replying they would need more time for reading the contract.

End of October – they replied that they changed their mind again and they’d already decided to purchase MS Navision. They asked us to call back in 10-14 days to follow up as they would be ready with the purchase from Microsoft by that time.

Beginning of November – they said they’re not sure they wanted to go for MS Navision anymore and they wanted to spend one month more evaluating both MS Navision and Oracle.

For me this discussion seems to be very crazy. There are four possible reasons why I was finally pissed off from it.

1). Customer has no control over what is going on with their IT. They have no clear understanding what they need as their sales system, and it’s clear that purchasing of any other external product will be just wasting of money as they do not know what to do with the basic sales functionality of their existing software.

2). The guy we keep talking to is IT Manager of the company. The customer (sorry, Non-Customer) is Saudi company, but the manager is an employee who came from Egypt. He definitely wants to keep his job and he is afraid of making any decision that might affect it. All these good words that you would be able to warn your patients about potential drug-drug interactions or precautions for pregnant women make exactly no sense to him, as the only thing he cares about is what the company owner thinks about him personally. If he makes bad decision to purchase wrong software (or the software the owner won’t like), he might loose his job and he will probably be forced to go back to Egypt having pretty low salary comparing to Saudi Arabia.

3). The IT manager probably has no power to make decisions, but he tries to make impression to us (and to himself) as he would have. I am not sure if this behavior is specific to the Middle East, but we had similar situations before. One product manager from a pharmaceutical company called us once and said they’d made a decision to purchase 400 licenses of our product with their advertisement in it. Needless to say that I have never heard back from this guy, and he’s never answered any of our calls or e-mails - even if he answered one time or two, he asked to call back later.

4). I am not patient enough. This might be very true, as sometimes I feel that things are moving too slow then they should. It’s probably because I need to learn a kind of “point of no return”, when it becomes simply useless to keep talking to the customer as it’s wasting of time.

Shell we keep talking to this Non-Customer? It depends on our work load. They would have been our first customer in Saudi Arabia as we’re entering the market right now, and they would get a lot of things for much better price. But now it looks like we’re going to be very busy for the next few months as there is a large demand on clinical decision support software on that market, so I am not sure we would be able to help our Non-Customers within the next several months. And, to be honest, I don’t want to deal with people who keep changing their minds every second week.

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