Software Business in the Middle East

It’s interesting to see how my respect to the salesmen has been changing over the passed years. It seems it really depends a lot on what position you are working on at the moment.

Salesmen are Losers

Working in the development team on a large project, you will most likely never meet any of the customers, as there are other people responsible for this, for example salesmen. In our large project at Siemens we had a team whose main task was to meet with customers and get the requirements for the new versions. Sometimes it happened so that our requirements were changed very often – literally, on Friday our list of requirements might look different then last Monday. It made all of us sick as it’s clear it’s almost impossible to work productively when your spec is getting changed all the time. The developers were not very happy about it and I couldn’t tell we liked our sales guys very much.

Salesmen are Wizards

After some experience trying to sell our software, I started to think that making sales was some kind of miracle, and you need to be a wizard to make it. Having technical background it was not very easy for me in the beginning to start making cold calls and then later on the meeting trying to convince people to buy our software.

Salesmen are Just Normal People

Finally, I’ve learned that sales are as important as development – but not the most important thing. You cannot make good sales with bad software, and you cannot survive having good product with bad sales either (well, I guess there are people who can make good sales of bad software). In our experience we had situations several times when we sold pretty large amount of licenses because customers liked certain features on the demo. But the fact was that those features were not yet done in the production version, so we forced ourselves to cut our plans off and implement the sold features first. Basically it means that we sold something that was not ready yet. It’s probably good for salesman, but bad for developer because all the development plans are simply thrown away since we got customer who wanted the features originally planned to be done later.

From another hand, implementing some of the features opens new opportunities for the sales – like implementation of the API for our product for internal use made it possible to sell the product to the organizations that would like to integrate our product into their existing systems instead of using it as Desktop application.

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When I just arrived to Dubai, I had no contacts who might help me moving the business forward. We had a few ideas about what to do, but we didn’t have money to advertise our company. Well, we had money, but at that time I was far away from the understanding that sometimes you simply need to bet your shirt in such exciting game as “your own business”. But even if you do not have money, you have to announce everybody anyway that you are here.

IT Magazines

I don’t know how I got this idea, but one day in Xing (it was called OpenBC at that time) I found contacts of one of the staff reporters from Arabian Computer News (ACN) magazine. I sent her an e-mail with the proposal to write articles for their magazine, she forwarded it to the editor, and this is what we ended up with.

It’s clear that nobody will allow you to publish articles only for the purpose to promote your products – but you get a chance to publicize your name and name of your company. After the first article, there were several others. Probably, IT industry in the Middle East is just in the beginning comparing to Europe or US, or probably it’s relatively simple to publish articles in IT magazines in any other country – I don’t know, but getting your articles published is pretty simple. This is matter of what you want to write about. There are a lot of ideas around, especially in the Middle East – I would never think that such old discussion about automatic builds and unit testing will be something that magazines would want to publish.

Through ACN magazine I was contacted by another magazine – IT Magazine Middle East to write the articles for them too. They are all welcome.

Healthcare Magazines

Similar to IT magazines, it is relatively simple to write articles for Healthcare magazines too. The demo of our drug database was not yet completed when we got the first interview about our product. Next day after the article was published, we got an e-mail from Pfizer (one of the largest International pharmaceutical companies) with the suggestion to meet and talk about our product. They haven’t yet become our customer, but we keep contact with them on regular basis.

Other three healthcare magazines asked us to send them articles with the screenshots of our demo. One of our competitors contacted us thanks to those articles. They are not yet presented in the Middle East, but they had some ideas about acquiring us.

Conferences

We normally participate in the conferences related to IT, as GITEX, or Healthcare, as the recent conference in Saudi Arabia. Good thing with those conferences is that they pay travel and accommodation expenses for the speakers. During the conference in Saudi Arabia they even offered us to deliver about 200 CDs with the demo of our drug database to distribute it among the participants – it was really the dream proposal!

Radio

I think I called one of the radios here in Dubai once – and next week I already participated on one of the programs talking about our drug database. Before that I always thought it’s merely impossible to participate on the radio program – but it came out that it was very simple.

After we started our company, something has changed in my mind – I never thought before that I would ever contact magazines to offer them writing an article or call to the radio to participate on the program talking about our ideas.

All these articles, conferences and participation on the radio programs are kind of advertisement that costs you literally nothing – you publicize your company, your product and yourself. It’s clear that it might not have the same effect as normal ads in the specialized magazines where you can put in a CD with your product’s trial version, but still you can use it to spread out your ideas if you don’t have large advertisement budget.

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