Selling on the shop floor
Enterprise sequences are worthless against a grocer who has never taken a vendor meeting. The right move is to go and stand in the aisle, and the metric that matters is not meetings booked.
Almost every meeting we book ends in a boardroom or a video call. One engagement in 2023 ended in supermarkets, and it rearranged some of our assumptions permanently.
The client sold store technology to independent grocers: the supermarket on the corner, the hypermarket in an industrial area, the family chain with four branches and no head office. Over eleven months we booked 98 meetings and 91 retailers saw the product.
None of those buyers take calendar invites from vendors. They are on the shop floor, and if you want twenty minutes you go to the shop floor too.
What breaks
Everything an enterprise sequence relies on.
There is no work email that the decision maker reads. There is a general address that somebody's nephew checks. There is no LinkedIn presence worth targeting. There is frequently no separation between the owner, the buyer and the person on the till at four in the afternoon.
There is also no such thing as a diary. A meeting is not an appointment, it is a promise to be in the shop around a time, which is a different commitment and needs to be treated as one.
What works instead
Book the meeting where the buyer already is. Ten thirty in the morning, at the store, with the supervisor who would actually use the thing. Not a Teams link.
Put the address in the calendar invite. This sounds trivial. It is the single most useful process change that engagement produced. A time without an address is useless when the meeting is in a shop nobody on the team has been to, and a rep who spends forty minutes finding a unit in an industrial area has lost the next meeting too.
Report the travel, not just the booking. When one of our reps confirmed a meeting with a prospect who gave only a general email address, his note back to the client was a warning as much as a booking: he has confirmed, but it is a long way to Sharjah and you may not find him. That is a more useful sentence than a line on a report saying one meeting was scheduled.
Count what a rep can physically reach. The constraint in field selling is not persuasion, it is geography. Four stores in a morning in one emirate is a good day. Four stores in four emirates is not a day at all.
The rule we took from it
Match the channel to the buyer, and be honest about the fact that most of what the industry publishes about outbound is written for people who sit at desks.
There is a whole economy of sequence templates, deliverability tooling and cadence theory built for a buyer with a laptop, a calendar and an inbox he manages. A large part of commerce in this region is run by people who have none of those things and are extremely reachable in person.
The other lesson was about collisions. When one of our reps booked a store that turned out to be already in the client's own pipeline, he flagged it himself rather than letting the two approaches meet in the aisle. That set the rule for the rest of the engagement, and it is now in our onboarding: confirm the account is unowned before approaching it. In field sales the cost of getting that wrong is not an awkward email. It is two people from the same company standing in the same shop.