Customer discovery interviews, and how many are enough
B2B customer discovery interviews: the sample size the research converges on, why your segments change that number, and the questions that get honest answers.
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BDGL / Insights / Partnerships
There is no list worth buying. What exists is six sourcing routes with different failure modes, a registration clock you can miss, and a deregistration process that outlives the contract. Get the eligibility rules straight before the shortlist.
The question usually arrives in the wrong shape. A founder asks where to find channel partners in the Gulf, meaning: where is the list. There is no list worth buying, and the firms that sell you one have understood the market less well than you have. What exists instead is a set of routes, each with a different cost and a different failure mode, and a legal layer that decides what the relationship actually is once you sign it.
Start with the legal layer, because it quietly determines who is even eligible to be your partner. Saudi Arabia is the case worth learning properly, both because it is usually the first market and because its rules are the most specific.
Two facts look contradictory and are not. The U.S. International Trade Administration's country commercial guide states plainly that exporters "are not required to appoint a local Saudi agent or distributor to sell to Saudi companies," and notes that full foreign ownership of retail and wholesale businesses was approved in June 2016. Meanwhile Clyde and Co, writing in September 2026, states that "only Saudi nationals and wholly Saudi-owned companies may act as commercial agents or distributors in the Kingdom."
Both are true. You can sell into Saudi Arabia directly, and you can own your own entity there. What you cannot do is appoint a non-Saudi party as your registered commercial agent. The restriction attaches to the registered agency relationship, not to the act of selling. That distinction is the first thing to get straight, because it changes the shortlist before you have met anyone.
The governing instruments are the Commercial Agencies Law issued under Royal Decree No. 11, its implementing regulations, and the Civil Transactions Law. A replacement law has been under discussion for years and is still not in force, so plan against the current regime rather than the draft you may have read about.
Appointing a distributor and registering the agreement are different acts. The agreement must be recorded in the Commercial Agencies Register maintained by the Ministry of Commerce, and applications are generally due within three months of the agreement taking effect. Miss it and you have a contract that works commercially and sits outside the register.
The part that surprises people comes at the end rather than the start. Ending the contract does not automatically end the registration. Deregistration runs on ministry procedure, it can lag the contractual end date, and an uncooperative outgoing distributor can make it slower still. If you have ever wondered why a company stayed with a mediocre distributor for two extra years, this is often the answer, and it is an argument for shorter initial terms rather than for better lawyers.
Ranked by how well they hold up, not by how easy they are.
| Route | What it costs you | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction from an existing customer | Nothing but the ask | Only works once you have a customer in market |
| A firm already selling an adjacent product to your buyer | Research time | They may be too busy to prioritise you |
| Chambers of commerce and trade associations | Membership and attendance | Slow, and heavy on people who attend rather than sell |
| Government matchmaking services | A fee, where offered | Produces meetings, not conviction |
| Banks and professional advisers in market | An existing relationship | Their shortlist reflects their client book |
| Cold approach from an importer list | Cheapest, and worth it | Usually ignored, for the reason below |
The guide is blunt about the last one. It advises against cold calls using importer lists, because the expectation is that someone be "properly introduced and have met face-to-face." It names the alternatives explicitly: other local firms, companies with existing in-market experience, banks, trade associations and chambers of commerce. For due diligence it points to a fee-based company profile service rather than to the seller's own references.
Read that as a sequencing instruction rather than a cultural note. The introduction is not politeness, it is the first filter, and a partner who needed no introduction to agree to meet you has told you something about their pipeline.
Our longer treatment of the models themselves is in three partnership models ranked by the effort each one really takes, and the market sequencing question sits in how to sequence a Gulf expansion rather than committing to it. Before either matters, four checks:
On commission the guide gives a range rather than a rate: commissions are negotiable and typically run from 3 to 10 percent, depending on the product or service and the duties the agent takes on. Treat the spread as the real information. A partner doing nothing but passing orders sits at the bottom, a partner carrying stock, installation and first-line support sits at the top, and a partner asking for the top of the range while offering the bottom of the duties has given you your negotiating position for free.
On exclusivity the guide notes that prospective agents "generally prefer exclusive agency contracts, but they are not required," and that policy now permits registering a new agreement over the objections of an existing distributor. Exclusivity is therefore a concession you are choosing to make, not a condition of entry. If you grant it, grant it against performance and against a defined territory, and keep the first term short. The clauses that carry this are set out in the channel partner agreement clauses that decide the outcome.
One more cost to price in before signing: agents may request parting compensation when a relationship ends. Saudi law grants no automatic statutory compensation on termination, and damages require proof of breach and harm, but the request is common enough that it belongs in your model rather than in a surprise.
The most common failure is not a bad partner. It is a partner signed into a market the seller had not qualified, which is a different problem wearing a partnership costume. Our view on that order of operations is in what sellers get wrong when entering the Saudi market.
The second most common is reputational and slow. Business circles in the market are close-knit, and replacing an agent carelessly can damage a firm's standing well beyond the one relationship. That is a reason to be slower at the start and more explicit in writing, not a reason to avoid ever changing partner.
If you are building the partner motion alongside a referral motion, the mechanics differ more than they look, and a referral programme partners actually use covers the lighter end.
Context on the regulatory side of selling into the Kingdom, if your partner will be handling an online storefront rather than only physical distribution, is covered in Arabic by our colleagues at KF Agency in a guide to the regulatory requirements for an e-commerce store in Saudi Arabia, which is in Arabic.
None of the above tells you whether a specific firm will sell your product. Partner selection stays a judgement made on incomplete information, and the routes above only improve the quality of the shortlist. Two practical hedges: start with a non-exclusive term long enough to be worth their effort and short enough to exit, and write the performance definition before you write the territory. If a candidate will not accept a defined first-term target, you have learned the most useful thing available to you at that stage, and it cost nothing.
Sources read for this piece: the International Trade Administration's country commercial guide on Saudi distribution and sales channels, and Clyde and Co's September 2026 note on managing termination and deregistration under the Saudi agency regime.
Send us the market, the product and the three candidates you are weighing. We will tell you which route each one came from, what their portfolio position implies about your priority, and which clauses to settle before the first term.
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