In 2021 we were hired to answer one question in five months: is this region worth it?
The sponsor had landed a first pilot in one Gulf country and had the whole world to choose from. He did not want a brochure about the region. He wanted to know, in weeks, whether the warehouses here had the problem and would pay to fix it.
What we did
Three weeks of interviews, then a narrowed segment, then outbound into it.
The twenty-one interviews covered retail and logistics warehouses in the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia. They confirmed the problem and did something more useful: they showed that third-party logistics operators felt it most, because they count other people's stock and get charged for the errors. The outbound that followed went at 3PL warehouses first.
Narrowing was the work
Fifty meetings in six weeks is a rate, and the rate came from the narrowing. A drone that counts pallets is interesting to any warehouse manager; it is urgent to the one who runs a contract with penalties for stock discrepancies. Three signed contracts in five months, from a standing start, is what happens when the first fifty conversations are with the people who are urgent.
What came after
The answer held. From April 2022 to June 2023 the engagement continued as a business development manager on the ground, working the contracts and the negotiations the first five months had opened.
What it shows
Spend the first three weeks on interviews and the segment will pick itself. The sponsor's question was answered inside the quarter, and the answer was yes, with the contracts to show for it.