In 2022 we were hired by one part of the group on the strength of the work we do for another.
The referral is the part worth pausing on. A marketing lead running corporate taxi in Dubai and Abu Dhabi came to us because colleagues in the group's advertising business told her to. Nothing an agency writes about itself is worth as much as one internal recommendation between two teams who have no obligation to be kind to each other.
The work she brought was harder than the advertising work. Corporate mobility is sold into a gap that most companies do not admit they have. They already have a fleet, or a limousine supplier they have used for years, or a habit of reimbursing staff for taxis and calling it a policy.
What we do
Three years across the UAE and into Asia, for corporate rides, fleet rental and delivery. 238 meetings booked, 160 confirmed held, 155 companies introduced.
Logistics and freight: DP World, Aramex, DHL, GAC, Naqel, SMSA, Gulf Warehousing, Dulsco, Tamer Logistics. Retail and grocery: Carrefour and Majid Al Futtaim, Spinneys, Union Coop, Choithrams, Grand Hypermarkets, LIFCO, Talabat, noon, Zepto. Construction, healthcare, schools, pharmacy chains and travel, down to individual campuses and clinics.
The head teacher who asked better questions than our brief did
One of our reps took a meeting with an Abu Dhabi school about moving students by taxi. The meeting went well and then the head of school explained, at length, why it could not start yet.
If the car has an accident, does the driver call an ambulance or book another taxi for the child. How does anyone confirm the student actually walked into the school after being dropped off. What happens when a ten-year-old comes out late, given that Abu Dhabi schools are not permitted to give a student's phone number to a driver.
Our rep wrote all of it down and sent it to the client with a plain conclusion: good segment, real demand, needs a contingency plan before anyone can sell it. That is what a booked meeting is actually for. The client did not get a signature that week. They got the specification for the version of the product schools would buy.
The same reporting habit changed the product line once more. After a stretch of meetings for the fleet-rental business we sent back the six reasons deals were being lost, and the most common one was that the prospect did not want cars. They wanted buses and minibuses. Yango Drive added buses to their marketplace.
Not every finding is a discovery. Some are just clean subtraction. We tested IT companies as a segment, found their people work remotely and travel rarely, said so, and dropped the segment inside two weeks in favour of real estate, construction and engineering consultancies.
What it shows
An outbound team is worth having for the meetings that turn into deals, and worth keeping for the meetings that come back with the reason a whole segment will not buy yet. A client who reads those reports gets a better product; a client who only counts bookings gets neither.