Lately, many SMBs noticed a drastic drop in the leads and inquiries they would organically get. This was either because of decreased demand or increased competition.

This implies going out there and looking for the right customers yourself is becoming a must. If you want to increase your customers, doubling down on your sales process is one of the most effective ways to do it.

Today, I am speaking with Josh Yates, sales director of Saphyte - UAE based CRM solution for small and medium businesses.

He will take you through the main mistakes SMBs make in the sales process, we’ll discuss how to identify the ideal customer or how to hire a salesperson to your team.

This episode includes:

- What are the typical mistakes SMBs make in sales

- How should the proper sales process look like

- Why and how to use CRM

- How to choose the right one

- How to hire salespeople

What is the biggest difference between a B2B and a B2C eCommerce? Customer acquisition. In B2C, reaching customers happen mostly via media and marketing channels while in B2B the whole approach is more omni-channel and includes direct sales.

Small shops and restaurants, and even the big businesses can save a lot of time spent on procurement as well as money when they start buying their supplies online. It helps sellers to remove friction points and make it as convenient for buyers to purchase the products they want. Its a win-win situation here.

“Bringing a delightful B2C shopping experience to B2B is our core value,” says Muhammad Chbib – CEO of B2B marketplace Tradeling, our guest for today’s episode.

He also speaks about challenges they had to overcome as one of the first B2B eCommerce players and also why he’d be very skeptical about launching just another B2C eCommerce brand.

This episode includes:

4:50 – How we reacted to our audience’s change of needs

7:38 – B2B eCommerce vs B2C

13:56 – Augmentation of clients’ business rather than disrupting

21:48 – How to start building a network of sellers for the marketplace

25:49 – Importance of (digital) marketing for B2B

31:39 – How to select a vertical for your eCommerce business

34:09 – What to consider when starting an eCommerce business

Do you know what is the major mistake startups make when it comes to digital marketing? Many don't have a well-sorted plan that will obtain customers and let them expand their business.

With an average attention span of humans being 8 seconds on social media (which is shorter than a goldfish), users need multiple touchpoints before they can buy a product or service from you. A good marketing plan will act as a guide to create those touchpoints and scale businesses.

Within 15 minutes, Lukas has managed to summarize the importance of a strong marketing plan, what a marketing plan shouldn't be, by means of a client's past experience. Tune in to learn more!

This episode includes:

3:15 min - Catch about impressions on FB and IG

5:20 min - Users need multiple touchpoints before making a purchase

6:15 min - What is a Marketing Plan?

9:50 min - What your marketing plan shouldn't be

10:40 min - Two things to keep in mind when working with a digital marketing agency

Influencer marketing today is what radio was 15 years ago, Feras Arafe – Founder of Expin says. We have discussed finding the right influencers, avoiding scams, not getting caught up with numbers, tactics to measure the results, and much more, tune in to learn more!

This episode includes:

8:40 min – Role of influencers in a marketing plan

10:40 min – Using discount coupons

15:50 min – Follow up tactic

20:00 min – How to find relevant influencers and avoid fake numbers

25:40 min – How to identify fake numbers

28:38 min – Do not stick to 1 brand ambassadors

What comes to your mind when you think of SEO? Do you consider it a scam? Do you think it is dead? Do you think it cannot work for small businesses in Dubai?

With such false ideas and thoughts, many businesses tend to overlook the need for SEO and completely focus on paid advertising only. While that can help you scale quicker, it also costs a lot of money, and in the longer run, relying on a few paid channels is a risky strategy.

SEO often seems extremely technical and complicated. But if you keep basic principles in mind, you can't get wrong. "What businesses forget is that Google's main customer is the searcher and Google wants to deliver the relevant results for every search," says our guest in this episode of Dubai Business Podcast. If you start from there, you will never fall for things like stuffing your page with keywords, buying non-sense backlinks, etc.

Mazen Aloul is a Founder of WebQuest SEO, whose main goal is to “demystify SEO” in the UAE. Mazen has put together a Business Owner’s Guide to SEO that you can find on his website and in this conversation, we will go through the main things you as business owners should consider when it comes to SEO in 2020. Mazen also shares with us some interesting tools that can up your SEO game. Tune in now!

This episode includes:

12:50 min - Red flags: How to identify SEO scam

15:25 min - What can I do myself to improve SEO

22:05 min - How can small business work with content

27:00 min - Google wants to think like a human

28:00 min - Understand this and you will understand SEO

Things are changing at a rapid pace these days and its human nature to get adapted to these situations pretty quickly. Which also is an indication that nothing is fixed. (It doesn't have to be as well.)

Okay, so let's start from the basics, your hairstyle changes from time to time, your hobbies change based on your age, your dressing style changes based on the season, right! What does that mean? Nothing is fixed.

So is your career. It doesn't have to be fixed and there is no harm in switching careers if you approach it properly. Also, don't let old beliefs trick you into thinking you have to be stuck in the same profession for the entirety of your life. You can always move on and find your 'right career' at any point in life, for good.

It is often inspiring when you stumble upon career change stories, take, for example, Jeff Bezos, before building a trillion-dollar company Amazon, he was a computer engineer. The Rock, had multiple career changes before he landed on TV and movies.

Today, we have for you one such inspiring career change story, where our guest Shirley D'Souza left her corporate job to become a certified keto-nutrition coach in the United Arab Emirates. She has helped a lot of people around the globe achieve their fitness goals and has enabled them to live a healthy and happy life.

In this episode, Shirley touches upon how her journey as a nutrition coach started, what struggles she had to face, how she got certified, and how she is making a living out of it.

This episode includes:

1:30 min: How she started as a keto-nutrition coach

8:20 min: How to price yourself when starting out

10:00 min: Mistakes beginners make in the keto diet

13:40 min: How she is managing to get clients

17:00 min: How social media benefits her business

22:00 min: Tackling low business seasons

30:00 min: Advice when you want to start business from your hobby

Are you thinking of running your contests or giveaways on Facebook or Instagram? That way you can create engagement, reach more people, and make them buy your products or services?

Sounds great, isn't it? Well... YES and NO!

Yes, because it will most likely accomplish the latter part.

No, because Facebook has created strict guidelines for running 'contests' and 'promotions' on their platforms. Many of us don't even know about half of it. And breaking their rules will end up getting your page blocked.

Now, you might be wondering how hard can these rules be! Let me give you a common example... You remember those giveaways where companies/brands or individuals ask you to do certain tasks like, follow their page, follow five other pages, complete a survey, tag your friends, etc? That's NOT ALLOWED.

There's a lot more to this list of rules, many companies do this with or without knowledge, but if you want to be on the safer side and avoid any troubles, we have got you covered.

In this bonus episode, Lukas Krejca, explains 3 major rules to be followed while creating a contest or promotions on Facebook and Instagram, a few things that should never be done and finishes off with a piece of insightful advice on how you can take full control of your contests without having to worry about Facebook rules.

This episode includes:

1:53 min: What Facebook defines as contests

2:18 min - What's not allowed

3:59 min - 3 major rules

9:53 min - Do this instead of running contests on FB

The UAE has transformed itself into a business hub over the past few decades. This has made starting a business in the UAE much easier than it was before. But when you make something easier, it should also be followed by strict rules and regulations to ensure there are no fraudulent activities happening.

While starting a business can be easy, there are many factors that need to be considered before and after you start it. Factors like having a written agreement, proper visa validity, trade license, etc. These are some of your legal requirements to start a business.

While you definitely can start a company without needing a lawyer, from experience, we can say that working with an experienced legal counselor can save a lot of time, hassle and, money.

In this episode, Biancka Gracia - General Counsel at Suits & Advisors talks about what startups need to consider when it comes to legal questions. What to keep in mind when you’re funding a startup, how to set up agreements with your co-founders, what to do when you’re getting investors on board or how to actually find a good lawyer.

This episode includes:

3:00 - Steps they took to tackle the current pandemic situation

6:30 - What to consider when setting up a company

9:00 - How to choose the right free zone

11:00 - What to take care of when launching your startup

13:30 - Multiple co-founders

17:00 - How to build T&Cs for your app or website

19:00 - Privacy and SPAM in UAE

21:30 - What to consider when you want to get funding

25:00 - 3 people you need to meet when setting up a company in the UAE

26:00 - How to estimate the cost of a lawyer and choose the right one

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 hit all of us on different levels. One business sector that was particularly affected was the F&B business. Strict lockdowns were imposed and hence dine-in was not even a thought in anyone's mind. People only relied on online food deliveries during the period of lockdown, even now after the lockdown has been eased people still mostly rely on deliveries.

Now, the thing about deliveries is that food aggregators like... we don't want to name them but they somewhat rhyme with 'tomato' and 'super eats' give a lot of offers to the consumers, which is great but is it actually great considering they charge huge commissions from the restaurants and these restaurants benefit very little from this.

It means that the restaurants we love never get the payment in full when we order through food aggregators. But restaurants had very few options as the crisis was hitting them bad, they HAD to join one of these aggregators to sustain their business.

This is where ChatFood comes into play. ChatFood is a comission-free online food ordering service, that gives full profit to the restaurant when we order through their services. Over the last 6 months, ChatFood has seen enormous growth and multiple restaurants joining them as you are reading this. We thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with the Co-founder of ChatFood about how things unfolded and that's exactly what we did.

In this episode, Benjamin Mouflard - Co-founder at ChatFood speaks about how ChatFood helps restaurants get back ownership of their delivery business by providing commission-free orders, what their values are, how they provide excellent service to their customers and much more. Listen to it now, and lets us know in comments how this episode was and share with us any thoughts you be having.

This episode includes:

5 min - tools they launched to help restaurants during pandemic

11 min - growth while maintaining quality

19 min - restaurant’s marketing

27 min - future for online ordering

35 min - does customer loyalty exist?

A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company's product or service in some way, shape, or form. For any company, it is really important to generate leads that will boost their business.

Companies rely upon digital marketing agencies to generate their leads. The thing is most of these digital marketing agencies just show the volume of leads they have generated with respect to the budget given by the company. Eventually, these companies accept it seeing a huge number of leads, but what they don't know is if any of these leads are valuable to the business.

What matters when it comes to leads is not the quantity but the quality.

Imagine you own a bakery shop, your ideal lead should be someone who is interested in buying what you sell in your bakery, say a delicious black forest cake. So when you call such a lead and talk about your products they should show interest in it. What I am trying to say is it would be really awkward to call a stranger (who could possibly be diabetic) and talk about your black forest cake.

In this short bonus, Lukas Krejca speaks about lead generation and shares five things that you can do to get quality leads from digital marketing agencies. Listen to it now, and lets us know in comments if you want to see more of such bonus episodes and possibly also suggest a topic that you want it to be about.