Advisory
Selling into the Gulf, with someone who has done it.
Startup mentor, go-to-market consultant and sales leadership coach for founders and sales leaders: market entry into Saudi and the UAE, founder-led sales that has to become a team, and the enterprise deals that take a year. One call to start. A monthly cadence only if it earns it.
Three conversations.
Sanity-check a Saudi or UAE entry
Founders and country managers about to enter the GCC, or six months in and behind plan.
Who buys, who introduces, what the first ninety days should actually contain, and which parts of the deck are a spreadsheet. Based on entering Riyadh, Dubai and Kuwait myself, more than once.
Run your first enterprise deal
Teams with a whale in the pipeline and no map of the account.
Stakeholder mapping that survives a reorg, what to do in the months where nothing moves, and how to price the first one so the second one is easier.
Coach the person who runs your sales
A founder who has just hired their first sales lead, or a sales lead who has just been given a team.
Monthly, direct, and about the ABCs before the techniques: attitude, belief, confidence, and how a manager inspects them without a survey.
How it works.
Start with one call. Forty-five minutes, no deck, you talk first. By the end you will know whether I can help and I will know whether I want to. Most people get what they needed from that call and we leave it there.
Then, if it makes sense, a cadence. A monthly call and a line open in between for the moment before the pricing meeting or the morning after the champion resigned. I take on a small number of these at a time because the value is in knowing your account, not in the hour.
What I am not. A consultancy, a lead-generation agency, or a replacement for hiring a sales lead. If you need one of those I will say so on the first call and probably point you to someone.
Mentoring at the Misk Accelerator since January 2023 is where most of the founder work happens. Accelerator founders should come through the programme; everyone else through the form below.
Ghassan is an empowering manager who likes to boost the confidence of his colleagues and employees with his approach. He is also one of the best professional sales tutors I have met.
The thinking behind the advice is public. Start with Market size is a spreadsheet and Whale deals.
Questions founders ask
- What does sales mentorship with Ghassan Nawfal look like?
- One forty-five-minute call to start, no deck. If it is useful, a monthly call and a line open in between for the moment before a pricing meeting or the morning after a champion resigns. He takes on a small number at a time.
- Is this fractional sales leadership?
- Closer to a sales leadership coach than a fractional head of sales. He advises the founder or the person running sales; he does not run the team or the pipeline for you, and will say so on the first call if that is what you need.
- Which founders does he mentor?
- Founders selling B2B into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, teams moving from founder-led sales to a first sales hire, and companies running their first enterprise deal. Misk Accelerator founders come through the programme; everyone else through the form.
- Does he advise on Saudi market entry?
- Yes. He ran the commercial side of Arabnet Riyadh, entered Riyadh, Dubai and Kuwait for the companies he sold for, and mentors at the Misk Accelerator. The advice is practical: who buys, who introduces, and what the first ninety days should contain.
Apply for a call.
Where the company is, and the one problem you would spend the call on.