What we learned
while we were
doing it.

Four years, 3,937 meetings, one region

What four years of calling the same market leaves behind, and what it is actually worth to the company that hires the team next.

The five questions a rep needs answered before he dials

The least glamorous document in an engagement is the one that decides it. A rep who has to say "I'll find out" four times has already lost the meeting.

Eighty-eight meetings and a hold rate we did not publish

Booking at pace and holding badly is a specific failure with specific causes. Here is what went wrong on one of our fastest engagements, and what we would change.

Twelve weeks, twenty-four sessions

Our training programme for reps who already know how to sell. Half of it is practice, none of it is a webinar, and it ends with an exam.

Book near

A meeting eleven days out is a different product from a meeting three days out. The one engagement where every booked meeting happened, and why it proves less than it looks.

Nine numbers that keep an outbound team honest

Most outbound reporting is designed to be shown rather than used. These are the nine we actually run on, including the two nobody enjoys.

Rehearsing with a machine

A colleague will pretend to be an irritated procurement manager three times. A machine will do it forty. What that changes about how a rep gets good, and what it does not.

The product hour

How we taught a team to sell a product nobody in the room had ever used, in one hour a week, with a quiz and an argument.

Qualify harder

A client who tells you your meetings are wrong is doing you a favour. The only wrong response is to defend the booking.

Spears in a market that reads them in a second language

Compacted three-sentence emails travel to the Gulf. Deliberate imperfection does not. What we kept from the method, and what we replaced.

An ode to the Justin Michael Method

One framework changed how our reps opened a call, and it is the only one we adopted without editing it first. Here is what it does, why it works on executives, and the two things we had to add for this region.

Nine minutes, no slide

For a genuinely new category the qualifying question is not who wants this. It is who is allowed to say yes, and the fastest way to find out is to bring the machine.

The meeting before the meeting

A buyer who insists on seeing the rep alone before letting his technical people near you is not wasting your time. He is telling you how his organisation decides.

Preaching hour, thinking hour, development hour

We renamed the same weekly session twice in three years, and each rename fixed something real. The rhythm a sales team runs on, and what each hour is actually for.

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.

The playbook we borrowed, and the three tactics that survived Dubai

Our first tactics playbook was lifted almost wholesale from an American podcast. Most of it worked. The parts that did not failed for reasons worth writing down.

The honest end of a market test

A three-month market test is a real product with a real deliverable, and the deliverable is sometimes the word no. The clients who get an honest one send you other founders.

We filled a Gitex booth from a mailing list

A trade show is a room full of your buyers with nowhere to go. It is also the cheapest meeting slot in the calendar, if somebody does the work a fortnight before.

Book fifteen to hold ten

The hold rate is a property of the buyer's job, not the rep's skill, and a team that does not know its own ratio will quietly stop selling to the people worth selling to.