Software Business in the Middle East

Last week we participated in IT exhibition GITEX in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. It was our first experience participating in an exhibition, and I have summarized this experience below.

The Niche Product

In the beginning I was sceptical about this event – it is general IT exhibition, and I thought that it would make no sense to show there the product for very specific niche.

Our software is not only for Healthcare, it is for such very specific niche in Healthcare software as Clinical Decision Support. I really expected that this exhibition would have no outcome for us. But fortunately, I was wrong. IT managers of hospitals and clinics used to visit such IT events. Doctors and pharmacists visit these events too – they might look for some funny IT stuff, and it becomes surprising for them to find a solution for their daily needs.

You just have to find a way to select the right visitors from everybody who visits your booth. The first day we put our demo CDs on a table in front of our booth where everybody could take them. And everybody got a demo, just because they were lying there for free. The next day we put our demo CDs in a special brochure holder where it was not very easy to pull them out from, so visitors started to ask us about what this program was all about. This way we tried to sort the visitors to pick up only those who are working in Healthcare, or who have friends or relatives working in Healthcare.

There was one Indian guy who asked for a demo being absolutely unfamiliar with any kind of software for healthcare. I tried to explain him that this software is mainly used by doctors and pharmacists and it would make no sense for other people. But the guy just shook his head with the mysterious smile and went away with a CD in his hands. Our neighbours in another booth joked that our program would appear in every Indian shop the next day for the price of 10 American cents

For the future, I think, we would need to show very clear message that this software is for the specific niche market – maybe some posters or something else. In this respect the healthcare specific exhibition would be the great opportunity for the potential sales.

The Quality of Marketing Materials

This is the last thing you would try saving money on. Our demo CDs were made by our partner in Saudi Arabia. The DVD box cover had excellent quality, but CD cover was not as good as it could be. The brown colour became red, and white font was sometimes not very well printed.

Next time we will make all print out work at home where we are able to control the quality, and then send all the materials by a courier. Nobody needs bad quality even if it’s cheap.

The good example is I.R.I.S. that makes OCR software. We have the same partner with them in Saudi Arabia so we shared the same booth. I.R.I.S. prints out all brochures and demo CDs in-house at their headquarters in Belgium, and then they send the materials to their partners and distributors by DHL all over the World. It is more expensive than to print stuff on place, but you will not feel shamed in front of your potential customers. This way I.R.I.S. has full control over the quality as they have printing machines in their marketing department.

Some other companies on the exhibition gave away free pens to the visitors. The quality was so bad that it was very unpleasant to hold a pen in hands. It’s really better to give away nothing than something of such very poor quality.

To be continued.

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