In 2021 we were hired to be the sales team in a market where the client had sold nothing.
The CEO wanted international expansion into developing markets and had no presence in any of them. We ran the UAE end to end: the list, the calls, the meetings, the follow-through into pilots.
What we did
In five months we had talked to more than fifty large construction companies in the country. Most confirmed that worker productivity was a problem; their estimates of what it cost them varied wildly, which is itself a finding. A pilot with a mid-sized contractor put a number on it: five million dollars a year.
The result that mattered came from the top of the market. After six months the product was written into the standard of the largest real estate developer in the UAE, so that its construction tenders went out with the technology as a provisional requirement. Two of those tenders had been awarded by the time the case study was written.
What happened after we left
The client hired a regional head and a small team. By our estimate their revenue from the UAE and Saudi Arabia passed three million dollars from 2022, from a base of zero. We did not run that pipeline, so the estimate is ours and stated as such.
What it shows
Customers admitting the problem are the early sign. So is a C-level buyer who engages quickly. Neither shortens the sales cycle of an organisation deciding to change how it builds, and the developer standard took the full six months. Sell into the industry where you already have references, then let the largest buyer set the standard for everyone below it.