Adventures of a tech salesperson in the MEA Region – PART 5

Blue water against the backdrop of the arid land at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt

HITTING THE GROUND

Once the targets are identified the next step is to undertake research about the target prospect company and each key individual you would like to meet. Using Google, Linked In, Facebook, alumni networks and membership of association data it’s possible to quickly come up with a decent profile for each individual you plan to meet. I have put down some points / questions as a starter check list to address in your profile build out –

• Where has he worked before this? Which has been his longest stint?
• Where did he study? What course did he take? Which country / city? Sometimes you will have a pure play Fine Arts person in a key role at a telco and you may then need to be on guard about the “engineering” bits in your conversation with him.
• Is he a fitness person? Biking, yoga, mountaineer… Does he go to gym? Which one?
• What is his philosophy of life? Spiritual / religious leanings…
• Is he an active member of any association / club? Toastmasters, Rotary, local club in the city he lives in, IT Association, industry association, ethnic club (Like India Club in Dubai)
• Does he play / follow any sport? – Golf, football, basketball, cricket….
• What are his significant career achievements? What were the milestones? Has he won any awards?
• Is he media savvy and visible in the media?
• Is he seen to have any technology favourites? Is he a Ericsson person, a Microsoft person or an Oracle person……?

Your discussions with partners and competitors will also provide clues about the person. You will need to build this Strawman profile for every senior executive that you plan to meet. Initially this may seem like a lot of work but as you work your way through a checklist with say 10 executives you will start to get a hang of where to look for information and it becomes much simpler. As I mentioned, the initial profile will be a Strawman because you will have to update it based on the meetings that take place with the individual and with the others in the organisation. Remember to strike up a conversation with the secretary. S/he will likely be a goldmine of information.

As a business leader, your challenge will be to capture all this information in your sales CRM system. Most CRM data are quite low on qualitative data and are focused more on “commits” and performance against the “commits” – a characteristic of a high velocity sales situation. In consultative selling that has long lead times for closure, qualitative data is very key to understand hot buttons and to line up stakeholders to pursue a close. One way to do this is to regularly review with your sales team looking for such data in the system and using a combination of carrot and stick to get compliance.

The personal profile enables you to start and have a conversation with him that is well beyond the I’d-like-to-introduce-you-to-what-we-offer kind of line. Creating the opening and engaging in the appropriate conversation to strike a chord is an art that can be learnt through lots of preparation, practice and an element of coaching. Trust me, most salespeople that I know will prepare around what their company offers and do some research on what could be some pain areas at that company and try and have a conversation around that. You will come across as refreshingly different if you adopt what I have suggested.

It’s part of the old school selling method.

1. Sell Yourself!
2. Sell Your Company!
3. Sell Your Offering!

Adventures of a tech salesperson in the Middle East & Africa region – PART 4

VITAL STATISTICS

As a sales person it becomes vital to get a grasp of what is possible and practical in terms of revenues – casing the joint in a way. What follows are some data points / statistics about the MEA region extracted from the public domain and analysed for my use. This has to be done for each vertical depending on your role / responsibility.

First of all an outline map of MEA (put one up for display at your desk)

Suggested map to be kept in your room or pinned to your soft board

Leading analyst firm Gartner estimated that the overall MEA market for services revenues in the telecom sector was approximately USD 2 billion per annum. While this analysis is dated by a couple of years the order of magnitude numbers have not altered much I would think. Gartner further estimated that the bigger players like Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens, IBM, HP etc had the lion’s share of this pie accounting for almost $ 1 – 1.2 billion per annum. That left about $ 800 million to $ 1 billion for the rest. As per Gartner’s estimate there are close to 100 vendors vying for this pie. These consist of Independent Software Vendors who do services along with license sale, Indian IT services vendors, MNC IT vendors and a number of local IT vendors. Thus if all being equal each vendor can on an average do about $ 8-10 million of services revenues per annum.

Given this scenario the challenge was to be able to stand apart from the crowd and do well above the “average” revenues.

The next job was to understand where you would get the best bang for the buck given limited time and resources to cover the market. Again while I use the telecom vertical as an example because of available data it might well be any industry and much of the data I quote is available in the public domain.

The MEA region has 251 wireless telecom operators and including Internet Service Providers, Fixed Line and Sat-phone operators the number is estimated to be around 350.

Out of the 251 wireless operators 47% belong to what I call group operators. Each group operator has a multi country operation in the MEA region and sometimes even beyond MEA. The key ones in Middle East are Etisalat, Qtel, Zain, Batelco and STC and the major group operators in Africa are MTN, Airtel, Orascom, France Telecom and Vodafone.

The MEA region has a total population of approximately 1.2 billion. 21 countries out of this cover a population of 918 million people and with an average mobile penetration of around 53% these countries offered an immediate sub set to start off with. Of course it was also important to pick 2-3 Group Operators to target.

The next metric that I used was what is called ARPU in the telecom parlance. ARPU stands for Average Revenue Per User which is a measure of how much a customer spends on an average per month on telecom services. Clearly higher the ARPU, more the revenues in the industry and hopefully more the investment – GCC region clearly had very high ARPUs, North Africa had mid range ARPUs as did South Africa but the bulk of Africa had rather low ARPUs.

All of this process while not an exact science allowed you to take an educated call about the initial set of targets to attack. I am sure each industry will have its own metric or measure using which it’s possible to get a feel of how the industry is faring. For example in the telecom world there are other metrics too like teledensity etc which are worth looking at.

The Vice Chairman in one of the companies I worked for introduced us to the Baltic Dry Index as a leading economic indicator when he made the state of the company presentations at All Hands Meetings. So it’s important to get a feel of the pulse of the industry you are targeting.

Finally, it is very important to talk to real people in the market and understand how, where and what you wish to target and whether your findings have any basis in ground reality. One set of people consist of technology partners like Oracle, HP, Cisco, Microsoft etc who are deeply entrenched in the market and have their presence in almost all the customers. The Alliance Manager and more importantly the Industry Manager in these organisations would have a view that is worth listening to. Industry analysts and management consultants constitute another set of knowledge that is worth listening to – Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Arthur D’Little, Booz, Mckinsey etc etc. Finally your competitors have the best kind of information that you are really seeking to validate and sharpen your findings.

Now, how to identify whom to speak to, how to approach them and what should be your conversation script is the big challenge that you need to work on. Why should these people open up to you and what is in it for them? All of this needs a lot of thought and preparation and with the right approach through proper connections it is indeed possible to get the information that you seek.

Hopefully by the end of this exercise you will know which markets to target and which specific prospects to go after in your first wave.

Adventures of a Tech sales person in the Middle East and Africa region – PART 3

Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel

Eagle’s Flight – On Ground Turbulence and coping strategies

So with an India base and an office routine back in Mumbai you are in the Monday to Friday mode along with your back end team that supports you in the selling process. Whereas Middle East customers and prospects follow the Sunday to Thursday work week and countries like Saudi and Oman follow the Saturday to Wednesday workweek. This means that my typical 10 day trip from Mumbai would start on a Friday evening!!! 😦 

Another disadvantage of working with an India base.

Time differences vary across the region too. UAE and Oman are 1.5 hours behind India – not too bad. Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain and Qatar are 2.5 hours behind – again pretty tolerable. Egypt, Jordan etc are in the 3.5 hour range and they have an adjustment during winter. Nigeria is much closer to GMT. Overall time difference with India for the MEA region is never more than 4.5 hours. So in that sense jet lag is not as bad as travelling to say the US or South America.

Immigration and therefore visa is a huge task in itself for Indian passport holders; I envy my UK / USA passport holder friends in this aspect.  I had secured a 3 year UAE work visa even though I was not permanently based there. This document enabled me to travel without having to take a visa in advance to all GCC countries except Saudi Arabia. Someone I know joked about Saudi Arabia saying that the Saudis are very fair – they make it equally difficult for every nationality to travel into Saudi Arabia. 🙂

Besides this UAE offers the e-gate card using which you can be through immigration in a matter of minutes and there is no stamp on your passport too – saves precious passport pages which are gold for the prolific business traveller.

Many of the African countries give Indians visa on arrival – Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda etc. South Africa gives you a one year multiple entry visa if you make the request at the time of applying and the Mumbai consulate is very friendly. The Nigerian visa can be a bit more difficult and expensive too. Did you know that Indians can get a visa on arrival at Jordan? But it’s best to take a visa in advance because the visa on arrival process is long at Queen Alia Airport, Amman – I have experienced it when I travelled there once with my wife. Likewise Iran also grants Indians a tourist visa on arrival but given the unpredictable nature of the Immigration there most visitors take a visa in advance. If you have a UAE residence visa it’s also possible to apply for many of these visas at the respective consulates in Dubai / Abu Dhabi – can be more convenient and quicker at many times. The more difficult visas are to Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria for us Indians. Lebanon unfortunately also counts amongst the difficult category.

One of the more difficult places to visit is Palestine for which you need to take an Israeli visa. The problem with having an Israeli visa stamped on your passport is that, you could have trouble with the immigration in the GCC countries (Saudi, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain). Previously the Israeli officials were flexible and would staple a visa page to your passport duly stamped for the duration of your visit. You could later remove it once the trip was over and there was no worry about an Israeli visa stamp on the main pages of one’s passport. They stopped doing this some seven years ago. Wondering how to get around this situation I met with the Indian consulate in Dubai who suggested that I might want to apply for a fresh passport that was valid only for travel to Israel. I did and got one within a week and the travel took place without a glitch. So for a period of one year till it expired I had two valid Indian passports – one for travel all over the world (except Israel) and one for travel only to Israel !!!

While waiting at airports it’s important to have lounge access. Credit cards come in extremely handy at such times. Platinum, Titanium, Gold versions of Master, Visa, Diners and Amex can be extremely useful and can allow you free access to lounges. The Marhaba Lounge at Dubai, Dilmun at Bahrain, Plaza Lounge at Muscat, the Pearl Lounge in Kuwait or the Premier Lounge at Johannesburg all give you free access with one or the other credit card. Of course if you can invest into an unlimited package of the Priority Pass card ($ 349 per annum) then nothing like it because it’s accepted almost everywhere. A lounge gives you a clean toilet, some quiet space, food and drink and above all free WiFi access – gold for a business traveller. And in any case the lounge is where you will likely run into a key customer or partner contact that is also flying. So do make it a point to invest in some or all these cards.

The best place to convert US Dollars to cash is at the airport if you happen to be carrying cash or traveller’s cheques. Over time most companies have moved to a cash / credit card. Again a good idea is to take the local currency from an airport ATM before you head into the city. While Middle East countries are OK and you will find ATMs at malls and gas stations, in Africa it could be a challenge. It’s best in Africa to take the money at the airport and discreetly put it away into your purse / pouch / bag.

The airport hustle is something that you don’t need to worry about much in the Middle East – things are professional and clean. It’s in Africa that this rears its head. So for example at the OR Tambo International airport in Johannesburg as I was walking out 2 cops accosted me and wanted to know what was in my bag. Basically they were threatening to delay and harass me and the price for avoiding that was some money. Since I was not aware of the going rate I handed in a Rand 50 bill and walked on. Later on someone mentioned that R 20 would have worked quite nicely.

At the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, Nigeria you have to be careful that you don’t make any sort of eye contact with any official because the minute s/he catches your eye s/he will stroll over and hustle you for a tip. At every stage they can demand a tip – while getting into the airport, at the check in counter, at the visa counter, at the security…… everywhere! Best to keep some Nairas with you till you get into the Duty Free zone and even then you aren’t totally free. There is another baggage screening just before you board the plane. I realized how Dr.Nicholas Garrigan would have felt as he sat in the plane with the non Israeli passengers at Kampala airport before it eventually took off during the regime of Idi Amin. 🙂

At the Kenyatta airport in Nairobi I have been advised to keep the exact change handy for paying the visa charges, else the balance will be taken away as a tip. 🙂

Once at the Khartoum International Airport at the time of departure, I was asked to place my bags on a conveyor outside the airport and the bags disappeared somewhere into the airport. Thereafter it was a big job to fight my way into the airport through the milling crowds. Once in I rushed anxiously looking for my bags, by which time one of the touts had taken possession of them and “offered” me his services to facilitate a check in!!! So make it a point to securely lock even your hand bags – you never know what you will encounter. I didn’t lose anything that time but anything could have happened.

In the Middle East it’s fairly safe to take a taxi from the airport and head into the city. Things are well regulated and cheating is rare. Dubai is the best and Saudi the worst with the others falling in the middle. But even then it’s much safer than Africa where you need to plan in advance and take care. Of course of late I have heard horror stories about Saudi Arabia too. Purse / Bag / Mobile snatching are not uncommon on even a busy and upmarket Olaya Road in Riyadh.

For travelling into the city its best to have the hotel arrange a pick up or request your local contact / partner to arrange a pick up when travelling to Africa. Feels a lot safer and in control!

Much more experiences to share in subsequent posts. Keep reading.

Mideast Nations Declare Friday Start of Ramadan

RAMADAN KAREEM to all my Muslim friends. May Allah bless you and your family!

US setting up new radar station in Qatar

The US influence in the Middle East continues to be strong though at local populace level there is quite some resentment.

Adventures of a Tech sales person in the Middle East and Africa region – 2

The iconic KINGDOM Tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Travel Tips – Eagle’s Flight

With 64 countries and over 250 telecom operators (I was in the telecom space you see) the coverage is vast and I chose to cover the region basing my family in Mumbai, India. I figured that wherever I stayed I would have to be travelling 3 weeks in a month, so it was better to stay where the family was happier. And for the company it was a lot cheaper to be paying me an India salary rather than a competitive Dubai salary. 🙂

Dubai is a mere two hours and thirty minutes of flying time away from Mumbai. And once you are in Dubai it’s a hub and a watering hole from where information about deals flows if you know the right people and places.

However the disadvantage with travelling to the Middle East & Africa from a Mumbai base is that there is no one airline that covers it all, though Emirates is quickly getting there. So your airline mileages are likely to be spread over half a dozen airlines and you may end up being no one’s favourite traveller – Emirates, Qatar Airways, Gulf Air, Oman Air, Saudia, Kuwait Airways, Etihad, South African Airways, Kenya Airways  and of course a gaggle of low cost airlines like FlyDubai, BahrainAir, Sama Airlines, Air Arabia etc.

So for example if you decide to fly direct to Bahrain which is a three hour and 30 minutes flight you would have to take Gulf Air from Mumbai because all other airlines would fly you via their country’s hub. You wouldn’t want a hopping flight for a mere 3.5 hour flight would you? It’s the same with Kuwait Airways, Qatar Airways, Saudia etc. Of course you always have the Air India option but given their poor on-time record one tries and avoids the airline for business trips. With a South Africa, Kenya or a Nigeria taking Emirates is the best option even though there is a break of journey and an aircraft change at Dubai. The convenience of the airline and the service make it worthwhile.

India is perhaps amongst the handful of countries that still permits night landing at its airports. With the result almost all of the Middle Eastern airlines land in the wee hours and consequently have red eye flight options on the way out. With the buy-the-cheapest-fare-ticket directive that travel departments have to comply with, you will invariably end up with a red eye flight unless you came up with ingenious ways to specify your requirements or have made deep friendships with the staff that did the travel bookings. Another painful rule was Coach Class if the trip was less than 6 hours. (With companies like Ericsson, Cisco, Unisys its Coach class all the way, which was a way of consoling ourselves) What this rule meant for me was it was Coach Class everytime because bulk of my trips was less than 6 hours of flying time. This meant I had to do the other things around my air travel a bit more smartly.

For one it was important to secure an emergency exit row window seat which is not a bulk head seat. The problem with a bulk head seat is that co-passengers will continuously clamber over your stretched legs from one aisle to the other looking for a vacant toilet on either side. It is possible to “put in a request” for such a seat at the time of booking and subsequently have the seat blocked through a web check in procedure. Now with a full time sales job all of this may not be possible by you on your own; which brings you to the point of having well trained and reliable assistant/s – a rare breed indeed. What I would do to have a Jeeves!! But Jeeves does not exist in real life and the usual Joans and Sandras that come your way tend to be way below par and require extensive coaching before they come anywhere close. Be prepared with loads of patience.

Once the prized seat is secured 60 percent of the battle is won. Now for the balance 40%!! On boarding the aircraft, it’s important to collar the chief stewardess / steward at the earliest and let them know that you are not having the meal. This is relevant for the red eye flight where every minute of sleep counts. As a matter of abundant caution it’s best to let a couple of more flight attendants know too – they change positions mid flight you know and you don’t know who might be assigned your row.

What you are trying to do here is prevent them (hopefully) from tapping insistently on your shoulder till you wake up to ask if you want to eat. When you are in a flight the deepest sleep strangely happens during the take off phase and it’s important to keep the stewardesses off you just when you have drifted off into deep slumber. The pouch that contains your headphones etc will likely have some stickers one of which will be the DO NOT DISTURB one. Stick it to the top of the seat on the headrest facing the outside i.e aisle. Despite all this there is no guarantee that she won’t wake you up and mutter sorry when you glare at her– Coach Class you see. 🙂

Most Middle East flights from Mumbai with the exception of Emirates to an extent will likely be full of labourers as your co passengers. This has its own set of difficulties for you as a traveller. I can’t recount all of them here but will try and cover some of the notable ones.

So even if you have managed to evade the stewardess’s insistent tap on your shoulder to wake you up for the meal that you don’t want, you might still have to contend with a green horn air traveller as your neighbour who will constantly elbow you in your ribs in his attempt to find something or the other; or the guy behind you who seems to constantly and vigorously punch at the buttons on his TV screen that is behind your backrest to ensure that you don’t sleep. Or the guys at the back who will hold on to your head rest when they get up or sit down which they will do so very regularly and in the process will yank your seat back by a couple of inches every once in a while.

You know what on second thoughts on red eyed flights to the Middle East in Coach Class from Mumbai it’s pretty hard to get any sleep – don’t even try to. 🙂

Adventures of a tech sales person in the Middle East Africa region..

A picture of the imposing Treasury at PETRA in Jordan

Landscape and Sales History

The MEA region has always been a part of the larger EMEA region with MNCs from the US and Europe.  Usually headquartered out of London or Paris mainly and with some regular travelling to cover the region which over time tended to taper off as the E of EMEA started to give more revenues, the MEA region generally got a step motherly treatment.

It was only in the last decade that MEA took to prominence and companies decided to locate sales people in the region. Dubai offered a great place as a watering hole and it offered all the conveniences of a truly modern city along with the flexibility of doing business plus an active night life. This period saw a spurt in the arrival of almost all of the world leaders in the technology business into the region starting out with Dubai and Bahrain and spreading into other countries as well.

In the Tech sales space the challenge always is communicating and getting the management mindshare for the region. Most times when business from US and Europe is good, there is no management attention to the MEA region.

“After all who is bothered about going to deserts and the Dark Continent?” is the ivory tower talk.

“Go on my friend. Run around and try your hand. But don’t go and do anything silly OK!” was the attitude that the CEO gave to the MEA sales team; that is till a slowdown happened in Europe and US.

Then all of a sudden MEA became the hot region.

“After all Middle East had tons of oil money isn’t it and Africa was the great land of unexploited opportunity? Go on boys, bring the moolah in” said the Board to the CEO.

The Middle East and Africa as a region is a rather heterogeneous one. 64 countries dispersed over a large mass of land makes it into a logistical, political and cultural challenge.  The region is broadly categorised as follows –

Gulf Cooperation Council or GCC comprising UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia is the most affluent because of the oil money. Because of this it’s a natural first strike for almost all companies wishing to enter MEA region. This region offers the best in class infrastructure, business flexibility and security for people.

Levant, though not a formal region amongst many tech companies consists of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. (sometimes Egypt is also taken into Levant). Barring Jordan this region is characterised by intermittent strife. The people of this region are known for their enterprising spirit though and most intellectuals in the past migrated to the West though they are now beginning to return.

North Africa is largely the Arabic speaking part of Africa. Many companies have a MENA region in their structure which is Middle East and North Africa. Key countries are Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. Yemen is a country that is neither here nor there and anyway at this point in time there isn’t too much business there due to the instability. Western part of North Africa comprising Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco are quite French in their leanings.

Then comes WECA which is West, East and Central Africa. That’s a very large and diversified region. West of Africa is completely different from East of Africa and both are completely different compared to Central Africa. West Africa anchored around Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast etc is largely French speaking and is quite populous. East Africa has strong links with the Indian sub continent and is perhaps very tech savvy and competitive. Anchored around Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda this region is fairly stable politically and economically. Central Africa is kind of mixed. Zambia, the 2 Congos, Chad, Central African Republic, Malawi etc are all land locked countries. Barring Zambia most countries have had histories of some instability and some of them continue to be unstable in parts.

Finally we have SADC which is the South African Development Council which are centred around South Africa and have Swaziland, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe besides Mauritius and Seychelles; again the more prosperous part of Africa.

Doing business in each region and within a region in each country is vastly different and calls for adaptability skills of the highest order. A tech sales person used to doing business in the developed markets of US and Europe will need to make this significant mental and physical shift in attitude and body language to be able to make a success of selling in the MEA region.

More about this and other stuff that I learnt during my adventures in the next set of posts – Watch this space!!

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