In 2022 we were hired to be the studio's sales department in the Gulf, and stayed eighteen months.
The studio had done international work, usually one step removed from the buyer. The CEO wanted the Gulf version of what worked at home: developers and industrial groups paying for their own interactive tools. The contract ran from June 2022 to the end of 2023, and the BDM reported every Friday. Sixty-two reports, the last one sent on 22 December 2023.
What we did
The first report, in June 2022, set out the method in four steps: contact identification, initial meeting, offer, procurement, with a demo at the second step and a price bracket said out loud before anyone spent time on a proposal. The early pipeline was wide: a Ghanaian developer, a Saudi glass manufacturer wanting its factory tour on a video wall, a KSA culture ministry project, Aramco for training, Emaar and ADNOC on the calendar for the following week.
In September the direction narrowed. The instruction was to stop selling abstract VR capability and sell one thing: an interactive sales tool for property, pitched to the head of sales at a developer, the person whose bonus depends on units moving. A list of the top twenty-five UAE developers went out that week; in January the Forbes top fifty for MENA was added to it.
Two projects paid for the pitch
The shipyard came first: the largest in the region, a twelve-billion-dollar Aramco venture, commissioned an interactive sales tool its CEO used himself, worth over two hundred thousand dollars, with a roadmap towards a digital twin. Then the largest telco in the UAE paid fifty thousand dollars for a 3D model of its data centre and showed it with us on its own stand at GITEX.
After that the conversation with every other developer started from the shipyard tool with a different logo on it. The 2023 reports read as one page of that conversation repeated: Nakheel, Emaar's digital team, Dubai Holding, Imkan, Deyaar, Arada, MAG, an engineering consultancy, a villa complex in Turkey, Miral for an events metaverse. By the fourth quarter of 2023 two purchase orders were won, a 3D tour for a housing authority in Abu Dhabi and a headquarters digital twin for a Saudi government-owned company, and nine named opportunities were carried into 2024 with expected order dates against each.
Where the client pushed back
The client read the reports. In August 2023 the CEO answered one with a page of notes: chase the partner for feedback on the Madinah tour, and stop describing the product to Nakheel as a render. Walk the buyer through the apartment, show the view from the window, show how the sun lights the living room at four in the afternoon, show the nearest school. Sell the thing that sells apartments, not a visualisation. That note became the pitch.
Local specifics cost the extra mile more than once: timelines that were impossible on paper, contracts less formal than the studio was used to, a Sharjah developer who could not use VR at all because off-plan sales are not allowed there. For the first references in a new market, walking that mile is the price.
What it shows
Package the success stories and sell the same project to the same kind of buyer. The first reference is expensive; every one after it is a copy. And a client who reads the weekly report and argues with it is worth more than one who files it.