In 2022 we were hired to arrange five interviews, and the five interviews rewrote the plan.
Healthcare is the segment where a cold call goes least far. The buyer is a hospital group, the product touches a diagnosis, and the decision runs through clinical and procurement committees that do not take vendor meetings from strangers. So the first engagement was not outbound. It was expert interviews, with the CEO in the room.
What we did
April 2022: a short questionnaire to fix the target profile and the questions the client wanted answered, then five interviews with the top management of the institutions that would actually buy, held in Dubai with the CEO flying in. Every one took place.
What she asked afterwards
The CEO's note after the trip is the most useful document in the file. Six questions. Offline meetings work better than calls, and she could be in Dubai every two to three weeks for three days: could the meetings be arranged around that? What happens between meetings, and whose job is the follow-up? The company needed to talk to the Dubai Health Authority and SEHA, which is a regulatory task, not a sales one: could we help? They were integrating with a hospital data platform: could that be used to move faster? The radiologists were enthusiastic, but pilots are approved by unit and clinic management: could we reach them? And the emails she sent after the meetings were being answered slowly, which she had heard was normal here: was it?
Our answer was a business development manager on the ground: meetings arranged around her visits, the sales cycle driven daily in between, the regulatory process walked with the authorities, the slow replies chased by phone. The proposal and contract went out in June 2022.
What happened next, honestly
The relaunch did not come. In December 2022 the company introduced a manager for MENA partnerships and we sent a fresh proposal; in May 2023 the CEO wrote that they expected to restart from September; in September they launched an English demo instead. Our team was still checking in, politely, in December 2025.
What it shows
In a segment that will not take a cold meeting, sell the research first, and expect the research to say what the client is not ready to hear. Five interviews told a radiology AI company that the UAE buyer is the clinic manager and the regulator, not the radiologist, and that entering means being here every third week. That is a correct answer. It is also an expensive one, and companies are allowed to take a year or three to act on it.