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In 2026 we were hired to talk to retailers about their least favourite subject.

This is our most recent engagement, and the pitch lands in a receptive moment. Supply chains in this region are still unsettled, and anything that makes the relationship between a retailer and its suppliers more transparent gets a hearing it would not have had five years ago.

The qualifying number is simple: how many suppliers. A retailer with sixty is running a manageable mess. One with three thousand is running a problem that no amount of process discipline fixes, because every one of those three thousand sends its data in its own format.

What we did

Three months across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, into the region's largest retail groups. 26 meetings booked with 19 groups.

Landmark Group, Alshaya, Majid Al Futtaim and its Carrefour business in Egypt, Panda Retail from the Savola Group, BinDawood Holding, Al Meera in Qatar, BFL Group, Brands For Less, Namshi, The Luxury Closet, Marks and Spencer through Al-Futtaim, Joyalukkas, Seddiqi Holding, AlMalki Group, BMA International, The Petshop and Zagzoog. Heads of IT, commercial directors, chief operating officers and directors of commercial excellence.

Three meetings in twenty-four hours, and one that asked for the project manager

The best week of this engagement produced three booked meetings in a single day and four across the week, into groups of this size. That is not a normal rate for enterprise retail. It happened because the reps had a number to ask about rather than a product to describe.

The meetings ran the way early enterprise meetings should. At one luxury resale business the first session went well enough that the client asked us to arrange a second with the technical project manager for the data side, which is the point where a demonstration becomes an evaluation. At a Saudi grocery group the commercial excellence director already ran a supplier data tool and wanted to compare. At a Dubai holding company the IT director's question was specifically whether this could sit alongside the SAP integration work already under way.

A note on timing, since it is visible in the numbers. This campaign ran across Ramadan, when retail operations in this market are at their busiest and their least available. It is the worst quarter of the year to ask a retail buyer for an hour, and the right response is to book with that in mind rather than to explain it afterwards.

What it shows

Find the one number that separates a prospect from a suspect and build the campaign on it. Here it was supplier count. A rep who opens by asking how many suppliers you deal with is having a different conversation from one who opens by describing a platform, and enterprise retail will give the first one a meeting.