Software Business in the Middle East

Just three months have passed since I came to Saudi Arabia the first time, and now I am in the Kingdom again. This time my partner and myself have been invited to participate in the conference “New Vision in Pharmacy Practice“. The conference is held in Riyadh in Saudi German Hospital supported by a number of sponsors. There are about 200+ pharmacists and doctors from Saudi Arabia participating on the conference. I have two topics to talk about – today I made a presentation “Electronic Drug Database” and tomorrow I will talk about “Electronic Pharmacy”, then I go back to Dubai tomorrow afternoon.

This conference is a great opportunity for us to promote our Greenrain Drug Database. Although I tried to avoid saying the name of our product or even pointing to it as an example because this is not some kind of advertisement event, people asked the question about it. Finally, I found representatives of couple large companies popping up at our table during the lunch with the questions about how they can get a demo and what kind of prices and discounts we have in case of volume purchase. Also, the conference organizers came up saying that if we wanted we could bring a number of demo CDs and they would make sure those CDs’re given to the participants as many of them have been asking for a demo. So tomorrow we will get there about 200 CDs delivered.

It is just amazing how cool opportunities might just pop up form literally nowhere. We got this invitation to come and talk on the conference about the topics we’ve been trying to tell to many of our potential customers for the past year. The conference pays for our travel and accommodation, and finally we got a chance to give out couple hundreds of demo CDs to the people, who are our potential customers – it is just fantastic!

This is the first time I speak in front of such large audience, so it is also the great experience.

In addition, we used this chance to visit couple of our potential customers in the near city Dammam. On Monday early morning we flew to Dammam where we had three meetings, and then we flew to Riyadh. This trip seems to be sort of “many-first-time-things-in-the-life”” – it is also first time in my life when I fly to one city having very busy schedule to meet a number of potential customers, and then the same day fly to another city – from the airport we came to the first meeting, and from the last meeting we went back to the airport.