B2B market entry in MENA without hiring in every country
B2B market entry in MENA fails on sequencing more than on strategy. Which country first, what has to be local, and the costs that appear after you commit.
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BDGL / Insights / Partnerships
Most partnership plans fail because they pick the most ambitious model first. Ranked by time to first revenue, the order is almost always the reverse of the order companies try them in.
Partnerships get discussed as a single thing, which is where most of the trouble starts. A founder says the plan is partnerships, everyone nods, and six months later there is a signed reseller agreement, no revenue, and a quiet argument about whose job it was to train the partner's sales team.
There are really three models, they have very little in common, and the useful way to separate them is not by how strategic they sound. It is by how long each one takes to produce the first pound of revenue, and what you have to build before it can.
A referral partner sends you a name. You do everything else. A reseller sells your product as part of their own offer, owns the customer relationship, and expects margin for it. A co-marketing partner shares an audience with you for a specific campaign and nothing more.
Ranked by time to first revenue, that order is roughly right: referral is fastest, co-marketing is close behind, reseller is slowest by a wide margin. Ranked by how impressive they sound in a board update, the order reverses exactly, which is why companies so often start with the hardest one.
A referral arrangement can produce revenue in weeks because it asks almost nothing new of either side. Your partner keeps doing what they already do, mentions you when the subject comes up, and you close as you normally would.
The ceiling is the problem. Referral volume is capped by how often the subject comes up naturally in someone else's business, and no amount of commission raises that number much. This is the part that surprises people: paying more per referral rarely produces more referrals, because the constraint is occasions, not motivation. What the design actually needs to solve is making the partner look good to their own client, and the shape of that is in how to build a referral partner program that partners use.
Reselling is the one that looks like scale and behaves like a second product line. Before a reseller can sell anything you need pricing they can quote without calling you, material they can put their name on, a support path that does not route every question back to your founder, and an answer to what happens when they sell badly.
That is months of work, and it is work on your product and operations rather than on the partnership. The revenue arrives after all of it. Companies that treat a reseller agreement as the start of the work rather than the end of it are the ones that end up with a signed document and nothing moving.
It also creates the arguments that need settling before they happen rather than after, which is a separate discipline of its own and set out in the clauses that decide month eight of a channel agreement.
Co-marketing is a shared campaign. A joint webinar, a co-authored piece of research, a shared stand at an event. It is cheap, it produces pipeline quickly when the audiences genuinely overlap, and it commits neither side to anything structural.
It is also the model most often described as a partnership when it is really a marketing tactic with a second logo on it. That is not a criticism, it is just worth being accurate about, because a co-marketing relationship will not survive being asked to carry a revenue target. Run as what it is, it works well, and the mechanics of the most common version are in running a webinar as a partnership rather than as content.
Partnership margin is usually negotiated in the dark, so it helps to look at a case where the numbers are published. Shopify sets out its App Store terms openly: developers keep 100% of their first $1,000,000 USD in gross app revenue earned from January 1, 2025, and 85% of earnings above that, with the exemption removed for developers earning $20,000,000 or more annually, who pay 15% on all app revenue. All billing carries a 2.9% processing fee on top.
Two things are worth taking from that. The first is that a mature platform prices distribution at around 15%, which is a useful reference point when a prospective reseller opens at 40%. The second is subtler: the rate is zero until the partner is genuinely successful. If you are designing a programme and you want partners to invest before there is proof, front-loading their economics rather than yours is the lever that actually moves behaviour.
That is a platform, not a services business, and the analogy has limits. Software distribution has near zero marginal cost, so a 15% share is affordable in a way it may not be for you. Work out your own floor before you quote anything, using the same logic as pricing a B2B service so the margin survives delivery.
For companies selling into Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, partnership choice and market entry are frequently the same decision, and there is a persistent myth worth correcting. The US Department of Commerce country commercial guide states plainly that American exporters and companies are not required to appoint a local Saudi agent or distributor to sell to Saudi companies, while noting that many firms still engage local partners to monitor opportunities, navigate import and standards regulations, and reach public sector buyers.
The same guide records a shift worth planning around: Saudi partners increasingly seek joint ventures with foreign firms rather than acting as agents or distributors. That is a materially heavier commitment than a reseller agreement, and it is a reasonable thing to decline. What it is not is a thing to discover halfway through a negotiation. The rest of that groundwork is in what sellers get wrong when entering the Saudi market.
One question separates a partnership that will work from one that will be quietly abandoned: what does this partner get that they cannot get more easily another way?
If the honest answer is margin, you have a reseller relationship and you should build for one. If it is credibility with their existing clients, you have a referral relationship and the commission is close to irrelevant. If it is access to your audience, you have co-marketing and it should be scoped as a campaign with an end date. If there is no clear answer, the partnership does not exist yet, whatever the document says.
The choice of who, rather than which model, matters at least as much, and Khaled Badr's note on how to pick a partner who actually helps you grow is a good counterweight to the temptation to sign the first company that says yes.
It is worth saying plainly that partnerships are frequently the wrong answer for a company that has not yet sold its product directly and repeatedly. A partner cannot explain a proposition you have not learned to explain, and a channel built on top of an unproven pitch multiplies the confusion rather than the revenue.
If you cannot yet describe, in one sentence, who buys this and why they chose you over the alternative, the partnership plan is premature. Sell it yourself another ten times first. The programme will be easier to build and far more likely to survive contact with a partner's sales team.
Tell us what the partner would actually do, what they would get, and how long you can wait for the first revenue. We will come back with which of the three fits and what has to exist before it can work.
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