Trust in the West is built on documents. Trust in the Gulf is built on presence.
Trust in the West is built on documents. Trust in the Gulf is built on presence. Most of what goes wrong between the two can be traced back to that one sentence.
Two ways of earning trust
In Oslo or Stockholm, a company earns trust before anyone meets. The certificate, the audit, the contract that holds whether or not the signatories like each other. The work is done on screens, over months, and the physical meeting comes at the end, for the signing and the dinner that follows it. Preparation is a form of respect, and documentation is how it is shown.
In the Gulf, the same documents are read and respected, and then set aside, because they answer a different question from the one being asked. The Gulf partner is not asking whether your product works. He is asking whether you are someone he can bind himself to. Whether, if he puts his name beside yours, you will still be there next year and the year after. Whether you will become, in a real sense, part of his own house. That is not a question a file can answer. It is answered by sitting with him, more than once, over coffee that runs long and dinners where the deal is not mentioned, until he has decided who you are.
Presence is the investment
This is why presence is the investment, not the reward. The mistake I see most often is not a bad proposal. It is a good proposal sent from home. The board approves a careful sequence: let us see if there is interest, then let us see if the interest is solid, and only then will we spend the time and the money to travel. It sounds prudent. In the Gulf it reads as the opposite of commitment. Nobody there will give you solid interest before you have shown up, because showing up is how interest is measured. The sequence waits for a signal that the sequence itself prevents.
I have watched excellent European companies lose to smaller competitors for exactly this reason. The proposal was superior in every measurable way. It did not matter. The other chief executive had been in those rooms for a year, eating with those people, asking after their families, visibly wanting to be a partner rather than a supplier. By the time the tender came, the decision had been made somewhere no document could reach.
What to do instead
So do not expect to close a Gulf deal from your own country. Budget the trips at the beginning, not the end. Go before you are invited. Go again when there is nothing to present. Put at that table the person who will carry this relationship for the next five years, and let them become a face people recognise.
Then bring every document you would bring at home. The paperwork still has to deserve the trust, once it has been given. Keep the warmth. Keep the warranty.
I wrote about the afternoon I learned this in From the Sand Dunes to the Fjords and Back.