Select Page

Human Resources – September 2020

During September we had 1 new joiner in Heba Alian. Heba joined as a researcher responsible for UAE content.  She is based in Dubai, UAE.

There were no resignations during the month.

Recruitment of any further commercial staff has been put on hold until sales improve.

Sales & Marketing – September 2020

Marketing

The KPI for marketing was quite high at 325 leads with 130 opportunities set as a target. Marketing activities included:

  • email marketing
  • Google Adwords
  • Partnerships (SABCO)

This resulted in 205 (158) leads and 72 (85) opportunities created during September.

Sales

During September 108 meetings were held (100% on digitally).

The sales pipeline in September grew by $259,800 ($338,620).  The total for warm & hot leads now stands at $1,345,620 ($1,361,170), slightly down after unresponsive proposals were closed.

Agreements worth $15,586 were signed and invoiced.

Customers added during September include:

Development update – September 2020

7 minor enhancements were rolled out during September. A lot of work was done for the research performance measures to enable the researcher pay-for-performance metric.

Normal support activities were carried out as well.

There was NO downtime during the month with the infrastructure stable and no issues reported.

Content update – September 2020

A new researcher joined the team mid-September bring the team count to 13 of which 1 is on maternity leave back 1 October.

September was the first month where the research team was rewarded using a performance-based reward system that allows the research team to earn based on their input effort.  It was met with a bit of resistance, especially the “under performers” but results exceeded our expectations.  That being said, we will continue to streamline the process.

During September, 262 new projects vs 82 in August were added. There were 615 new companies created and verified vs 502 during August. There were 1,803 contacts (people) created during September vs 1,839 in August.

We are currently researching cost data to build a library of cost splits on project type for materials, labour & equipment. This project will be completed by the end of October after which it will move to product development.  We have also researched basic country resource data such as oil, gas, power, etc production statistics.  This will go into production in December 2020.

September summary and outlook for October 2020

September was another tough month with the impact of COVID-19 weighing on business activities in general.  Companies are still cutting back on spending and feedback is most budgets are frozen until Q4 2020 or Q1 2021 when the new financial year kicks off.

We have signed up a couple of paid trials to the end of the year and will continue with the strategy.   We expect most of Q4 to be difficult on the sales side, although with increased activity with the pipeline growing further.  At the end of, the pipeline closed at $1.3 million of warm & hot leads.

The commercial team’s focus would be to nurture these leads to ensure we can close them as soon as possible.

 

Strengths

  • Only content provider with a team based in Africa
  • Best content management team
  • Best commercial team
  • Signed a number of partnership agreements with resulting in increased commercial activity and marketing opportunities

Weaknesses

  • Cash flow pressure during a pandemic

Opportunities

  • Partnership opportunities with country governments & investment funds which will provide us critical content and prestige
  • Demand for an alternative content provider for the Middle East

Threats

  • Cash flow