It was a WhatsApp call. Three of us on the line me, my colleague Ahmad who handles marketing, and a real estate agent based in Dubai. Same as us, Pakistani, but operating in AED and pursuing customers in UAE without any consideration for one’s origin as long as one can clinch sales deals.
He wanted a new website. His current one was WordPress that is slow, cluttered & not optimized according to the modern google standard guidelines, looked like it hadn't been touched since 2016. I'd seen the link two minutes before the call and already had my pitch loaded: rebuild it in Next.js, kill the bloat, modern architecture, fast load times, clean design system. I was ready to talk shop.
did. It must have been two or three minutes.
Somewhere along those lines, I noticed that he had fallen silent in a particular way, a silence not of one who is listening but of one who is waiting for me to reach the point. And then he asked, resetting everything we’d just covered: “Okay, but will this bring in customers? I need leads. I need sales.”
I kept talking. He kept repeating the same three words to me, reordering them each time, as if to check whether he could get me to say something related to them. But I had not. I had been speaking of frameworks. He had been talking about money. They are not the same conversation, although they are being held simultaneously.
It was then I got it. Not once did he even ask one question about the technology stack used throughout the entire session. It mattered not whether it was Next.js, WordPress, or hand-coded HTML. To him, it didn’t matter because it was our headache. What he did care about was whether this person could grow his business.
My colleague did.
It was his turn to walk the funnel - how prospects would get to the site, what would happen once they arrived there, how questions would become phone calls, how those phone calls would result in closed business. And he never said a word about any technology. He spoke about nothing but outcomes. And the prospect latched on to that portion of the conversation in a way that he never latched on to mine. He asked questions. He agreed with some aspects of the strategy right then and there.
And then there was the number. We priced it at 5,000 AED, all-inclusive, development and marketing included. But we weren't throwing this figure in blind; we had sat down before and calculated how much it would be reasonable for us to ask for. But the very moment the figure came out of our mouth, something about his tone changed. "If he's paying in AED," he told us, "he'd prefer to hire a local UAE company within that budget." It was this additional thing that he said that really left an impact on us: he was speaking to us in Urdu, we were Pakistani, and he wanted to be charged Pakistani prices not Dubai prices.