You closed London in 2 months. Jakarta has been "almost there" for 8 months. Your AE swears they loved the demo. Your board wants answers.
Here's the only answer that matters: you ran the same sales process in a country where that process does not exist.
Why London felt easy
Email Monday. Demo Wednesday. Proposal in 2 weeks. Signed. Done. Everyone knows the steps, everyone follows them. If the answer is no, they tell you. Usually before the main course arrives.
So you did the same thing in Jakarta. Email Monday. Demo Wednesday. "Just checking in 🙂" Thursday. Then 11 Fridays of silence. Your CRM says the deal is close.
Your gut says it isn't. Your gut is right.
How decisions actually get made here
There's a word for it: musyawarah-mufakat. Every person with a stake in the decision gets heard before anyone signs anything. It is not a delay. It is how the room works.
On top of that sits something called ewuh-pakewuh, the unwillingness to tell an outsider "no" directly. So nobody does. They just go quiet.
Your contact at the company is not ignoring you. He is waiting for Pak Hartono to feel comfortable. Pak Hartono is waiting for Bu Sari to weigh in. Bu Sari is waiting for the Bapak (the one person whose opinion closes or kills the deal) to nod.
Your AE is not in this conversation. Your emails are not either.
"By the time your salesperson sent the first follow-up, the person who mattered had already heard someone else's name three times — from people he trusted."
What the vendor who won did differently
He did not move faster. He started earlier.
He was introduced through someone the company already trusted, 60 days before his first meeting. He made sure three people inside the building had heard his name, not from an email, but from a conversation they were already having without him.
By the time the group sat down to decide, he was already a familiar name in the room. He was not pitching. He was being confirmed.
You were still waiting for a reply.
The short version
The deal is won or lost before the first meeting. Moving fast after that meeting does nothing — the conversation that matters already happened without you. The only way to be in it is to start 60 days before anyone sends a calendar invite.
Knowing this is one thing. Knowing exactly whose conversation to get into, how to get into it, and what to do on each of those 60 days — that is the part nobody writes down. We did. Who the real decision-maker usually is, what silence actually means, and how to follow up without being ignored.
It's 20 slides. It's FREE. And it covers everything your AE should have known before the first email went out.
Saleh Nabil
Founder @ Xpandeast