Software Business in the Middle East

This is another post about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle. All posts about the trip might be found on this link.

Translation from Swedish in free style. The original post might be found here. Pictures related to this post are stored on this link.

The map of the passed distance described in this post might be found here.

Day 12. Torun – Wloclawek. 60 km.

After the breakfast with bread, sausage, cheese and yogurt, the cyclists went further. The weather was excellent so they were riding under the bright autumn sun. The day was ordinary, just riding.

Day 13. Wloclawek – Leczyca. 80 km.

Pedalling the entire day, the cyclists set a camping near the hotel Senator in Leczyca – on the hotels lawn. The excellent tradition Polish dish with pork and potato was served for the dinner.

Day 14. Leczyca – Pabianice. 70 km.

The good start from the morning stopping only at the coffee-shop in town Zgierz to have coffee and another cheeseburger.

This stop was before the city Lodz where the traffic was terrible with a lot of retro-trucks on the roads. The guys stayed in the city as it was merely impossible to ride further in such terrible traffic (RK: I am afraid that really heavy traffic is awaiting somewhere later in Iran or Pakistan).

In the evening each of them got a bottle of wine in Lidl and a box of kex (RK: they seem to be really serious men ) and spent night around the mandatory bonfire.

Day 15. Pabianice – Radomsko. 80 km.

Tired from the morning, the cyclists started the ride towards a beautiful village to have a breakfast. The ride went by rough terrain and mountains appeared time to time on the horizon. The lunch went in a restaurant with lousy service and unpleasant waiters. In the evening, after the rain, the bonfire had the same sad and poor look and feel as the waiters in the restaurant.

Day 16. Radomsko – Pradla. 60 km.

In one of the shops Nino forgot his Gore-Tex gloves that was later taken by “entrepreneurial” driver from a bakery. The gloves came back to Nino thanks to one lady who pointed to the guy who had taken them. That guy was pretty unhappy to return the gloves back.

In another shop the cyclists met with a teacher who spoke pretty good English. The teacher invited them to the restaurant in another part of the city, where they ordered 6 portions of Bigos - the Polish national dish that consists of cabbage and meat. The chat with the teacher was really good – they talked about everything from Lada cars in Poland to UEFA Euro 2012 that would be hosted in Poland and Ukraina.

Day 17. Pradla – Krakow. 80 km.

The alarm-clock was set at 8 am since the next day guys planned to ride for 80 km on the pretty rough road that went up and down. The breakfast was eaten on the road side next to the shop. The ice-cold yogurt was almost of the same temperature as air – close to zer0 degree Celsius. That was the coldest morning since the beginning of the trip.

30 km from Krakow the hills were over and the road went down. IKEA was one of the first places the guys saw when they entered the city, so they just dropped they bikes at the entrance and run inside guided by the most beautiful smell of meet balls (RK: this is Swedish national food. Here in Dubai we used to visit IKEA just to have this dish) since the time when Vlad Tepes got his first canine tooth (RK: interesting idiomatic phrase, just curious if the guys invented it themselves or it’s commonly used in Sweden?).

After the lunch the guys got a room in Premium hostel that was not bad at all and started to decorate their room in red by hanging around their sleeping bags to dry them out. The Swedish flag was also hung on the wall. Then they showered as three river crayfishes in August.

The first thing to visit was Stare Miastro, the Old Town in Krakow – the historical and cultural centre as well as tourist place. Currently the plans are to relax for a couple of days and have a walk in the city looking around.

The trip goes as planned so far. The weather’s good although the rain waked the guys up several times in the morning. All three feel good, probably also because they decided to change the trip route and visit also countries of Arabian Peninsula. From Turkey they will go to Syria, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (RK: Here I hope to meet the guys :-)). The final destination – Peking - is still the same.

The next post will be from Budapest where one of the cyclist’s sister lives. It will happen in a few days when they pass Tatra Mountains, or “The High Tatras” as people in Poland like to call them.

All posts about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle can be found here.

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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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Eric Sink has published his presentation from Business of Software conference. The original post is here and the presentation is available on this link.

I think that presentation is a very good and brief summary of what Eric has written so far on his blog about marketing for geeks, and I strongly recommend to read his blog through if you are running your own company or you want to start it. Few highlights from the presentation:

• The process of development and marketing is presented in a pseudo-code, something very clear for developers.
• Development is sandwiched between two marketing steps: (1) Decide What to Build as Strategy and (2) Tell Everybody About It as Communication. Developers tend to forget about step 1 thinking about step 2.
• Geeks are really bad at marketing, but almost everybody else is bad at marketing too.
• Excerpt: “We think of marketing and sales as something that can subtract value if it is done poorly, not as something that can add value if it is done well.”
• Example: Moving more expensive products on a web site on the top of the list of products increased the revenue by about 30%. This is the one of the shocking discoveries that cool features of your product is not the only source of you increased revenue.
• Excerpts: “Don’t compromise on product or craftsmanship, but respect the value of marketing. And sales.”
• Tendency to think that bad ideas are good, and good ideas are bad. The example is given for the product SourceOffSite – the kind of remote access for the SourceSafe. In the beginning Eric thought this product was a bad idea – but finally the revenue for this product for the past 9 years is $14,837,958.17. Not bad at all.
• Products would have more chances to get more sales if we stop thinking about technologies and programming languages and start thinking about how to solve real problems the normal people have.
• Great excerpts:
  • “Customers do not care what language my product is written in.“
  • “They don’t care about what library I used or how much fun I had learning a new technology or platform or tool.“
  • “They just want their problem solved, and many of them are seriously annoyed that they have to use a computer to do it.“
  • “The only way to overcome that annoyance and get their money is to create a product that is simply beautiful, and completely focused on what they want to do.”
• Marketing is not black and white as we used to in the binary world. Marketing and sales have a lot of gray. It affects that we think about competition as “get it all or nothing”. But truth is that normally there is no single company that takes all the market. Player number 5 or 10 might also have solid revenue too.
• As result, for sales and marketing you would ask question “How many people will buy my product?” rather than “Will people buy my product?”.
• Don’t be afraid of the competition – if you want to make a product that nobody else has made before, it might probably mean that nobody needs this product. Escaping the competition you escape your customers. (РК: Sure, there are some example of the niches where you can earn tones of money just because nobody have ever thought there would be any money).
• Finally – make your marketing and sales efforts to be fun for you. Marketing is not a miracle, and everybody can learn how to do it.
  

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