A LinkedIn ad for scooter riders
I reconnected with the CEO and co-founder by accident, because he started to advertise scooter riders. It came to my notification on LinkedIn, and I thought they were coming back to London, because I previously worked in London at Quiqup and I got to know them briefly.
We reconnected, and we started to talk. He asked me what I'm currently doing, and I shared my growth hacking and growth marketing framework. He liked it, and he asked if I would like to come to Dubai. I said I would consider.
At that time, I already had an offer, and I was taking some time off in between. I decided to try it, and I came for only 1 month on a contract basis. I came in December and was starting to work on a plan and things from London.
One of the mistakes I made, and later I found out, was that I came as a contractor, so I was quite aggressive. I knew I had a limited amount of time to make an impact, so I was quite aggressive, and not everybody took this well.
There was no department
We already had some understanding about growth and marketing in Dubai. We didn't have a department at all, at least at that time when I joined. But they have signed up for some program, and we've been experimenting with some growth marketing. It is specifically for founders. I forgot which program it was, but we were kind of towards the end when I joined.
I think a team of five have been involved, and they have run some customer service, which was very nicely organized. They have been doing some other light experimentations.
I was asked to come in and set up the growth marketing department and set it in a direction, and that was kind of my goal. I had lots of things planned, and I was doing mostly all of it by myself, with support from the rest of the team. Everybody was very supportive.
What I found
I had to do a lot of stuff, almost like 360 optimization and deep dive into more things I discovered.
The website was pitching the old company
The website needed to be updated. I don't think it was optimized to pitch it in the right way. Also, we were repositioned from food delivery to e-commerce, and that needs to be updated as well.
SEO left since the London rebrand
SEO was very neglected because we were running on a headless CMS. Nobody really liked it. That came from rebranding from London time. So I had to work with developers to at least get fundamentals in place: running some reports, seeing where we are. Mostly, we get SEO from brand recall, people searching for that brand, and set foundations for SEO.
The position-tracking export from my last week is still on file. 243 keywords tracked, 127 of them ranking, 61 in the top 10 and 18 in the top 3. "delivery services dubai", at 5,400 searches a month, was one of them.
Ads to catch the demand that already existed
I ran ads on Google and some LinkedIn to capture existing demand, especially on Google, and to engage with our target accounts and prospects.
Salesforce built for a company that no longer existed
I went through Salesforce. It was set up for sales enterprises from all times, and I think it was way overkill. Not a lot of people used it in that way, so it was neglected.
I worked through and cut out probably 70% of that, just kept it quite simple, and simplified a lot of that. And implemented a simplified process, so we are able to track more closely how the sales opportunity is being managed.
Nobody knew who was closing
Also, leadership and the other team had no idea who is closing. For instance, there was a very good closer, but he only closed a few deals, and he worked on very few. Another guy worked on half of the existing opportunities, and his close rate was very bad.
On a team of five, holding half the open opportunities is about three times a fair share, and the two of them sat roughly three times apart on close rate. The pipeline was concentrated on the person least likely to convert it.
I went through and crunched some numbers and provided some ability and understanding for the leadership, so we can optimize and provide the necessary training for the people. To establish a benchmark and figure out where we are losing opportunities, and potentially reshuffling opportunities for the bigger deals to the sales reps who can actually close.
ABM had no structure
There was also not much done on account-based marketing, so I put structure in place and created some campaigns.
One of them came out of talking with some of the customers, and also talking with sales reps who struggle to pitch why delivery is quicker. It was slightly more expensive than the market.
What I brought from parcelLab
Based on my previous experience at parcelLab, I came from a post-purchase experience where parcelLab had the data, but they didn't provide the delivery themselves, so they could not improve much in that way. They can only improve communication.
But Quiqup was in a position, because we were kind of like an e-commerce delivery startup where they had control over the communications and delivery. So we were in quite a unique position.
I explained what the post-purchase experience can be, and how it could be upsold and cross-sold and promoted other brands. Kind of like a marketplace to discover other brands while shopping at one shop. It becomes, in some way, like a flywheel between the ecosystem among these brands, so we quite liked it.
I supported the repositioning of the company in that post-purchase experience phase, and raising the funds.
I am happy and pleased to say that later we expanded into Saudi, which we had been trying and thinking about for quite a while. I helped with that company repositioning, and that was quite exciting to apply my industry knowledge from mostly Europe.
The post-purchase experience I was describing is the one I had spent three years selling, at a company that held the data but never touched the parcel.
Read the parcelLab ABM campaignsSo I let them experience it
I created this account-based marketing campaign to start new conversations, but also accelerate existing opportunities.
I created a shop, which was just one product, kind of like a bag, a gift, at shop.quiqup.com, which they would send to our prospects via email. Use it as a sales tool, or the postcard, so they can experience the end-to-end delivery. Which includes communications, delivery itself, customer support, and returns and anything in between.
That would help: instead of trying to explain, prospects can actually experience it.
It was a Shopify shop. It took about a month to build this campaign, and after that, it was me running it, with some other people supporting. Salespeople were following up, and I was always locally managing operations.
For some customers or prospects who signed up, we delivered within 25 minutes, to showcase our speed and efficiency, to give us a wow factor.
Inside the bag, I created a postcard with a three-step process using a QR code, and in the end, they can book a meeting with a sales rep, who can demo or arrange a meeting in person.
The card went through two versions. The first was headed "E-Commerce Deliveries Reinvented" and numbered the steps Experience, About Us, Demo. The second dropped the slogan for a plainer promise, "Improve post-checkout experience", and put the sales rep's own face inside the third QR code, so the meeting was with a person rather than with a company.
Somewhere between 50 and 150 went out, and roughly a quarter of the people who received one booked a meeting off the card.
When you are priced above the market, you cannot win the argument. You have to move it out of argument and into experience.
One month became six
In the end, leadership quite liked what I have done, and they want me to stay. They convinced me to stay in Dubai, and so we extended my contract, totaling roughly around half a year or 6 months. After that, I moved to a crypto company, Phoenix.
What I would do differently
It was an interesting journey. I think I was too aggressive, and I think if I have to change one thing, I would be slightly less aggressive and sell more. I must try to sell my ideas more. Why are we doing what we are doing?
I think I didn't manage to engage or get on board sales reps. I think sometimes I find that if they are doing what I ask them to do in terms of follow-up and stuff like this, it felt like they are doing the favor to me. Instead of me creating this as a tool for them to open more and new opportunities.
I think I would spend more time explaining and involving them sooner, instead of trying to drive the end-to-end campaign and, after that, plugging them in mostly just to follow up. I think in this way, it could have been more effective.
That was because I was squeezed. I was squeezed a lot. I wanted to do a lot in one go, and I just decided that it's just easier for me to do it in this way. That is something I learned, and I'm doing it much differently now.