58 meetings in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in three months
Feeders, feeders.pt
- Industry
- Architecture, exhibition stands, brand activations
- Home market
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Target markets
- Saudi Arabia, UAE
- Channels
- Cold email and LinkedIn
- Result
- 58 meetings booked in the first three months
About Feeders
Feeders is a Lisbon based architecture studio founded in 2010. They design and build exhibition stands, brand activations, event environments and retail and office fit outs, and they run the whole thing themselves: concept, build in their own workshop, installation and takedown.
Their work sits behind Web Summit, Microsoft, PlayStation, Visa, Red Bull and Rock in Rio, among others.
The challenge
After more than a decade of building a strong position in Portugal, Feeders decided to expand into the Middle East and open an office in Saudi Arabia.
The portfolio was never the problem. The network was. In Lisbon, work arrives through relationships built over years. In Riyadh and Dubai nobody knew the name, there were no warm introductions, and no local track record to point at.
The Gulf is also a difficult place to go cold. Senior people there are heavily targeted, generic pitches get ignored, and by the time a project reaches tender the relationships are usually already formed. Feeders needed to be in the room early, and needed a lot of rooms.
What we did
- Built the market map from scratch.
We identified who actually commissions physical builds in the Gulf: real estate developers and destination authorities, event and experiential agencies, and brand and marketing teams running activations. Several hundred companies, capped at a maximum of five contacts each, so we reached the right titles rather than everyone with an inbox.
- Sent from a person, not a brand.
Everything went out from the studio's Head of Marketing and Growth, across both email and LinkedIn. Prospects were replying to someone at Feeders, not to an agency working on their behalf.
- Made the first message low pressure by design.
The opener did not sell a stand. It asked whether the prospect does brand activations or anything physical at all. Short, one question, no urgency, no links. The goal was to start a conversation about future cooperation, not to close anything over email.
- Led with proof instead of adjectives.
Where credibility was needed we named the work: Web Summit, PlayStation, Red Bull. A Lisbon studio nobody in Riyadh has heard of becomes a great deal more interesting once you know whose stands they have built.
- Handled every reply the same day.
Responses ran through a structured flow with one job: get a short video call into the calendar that week or the next. No qualifying over email, no back and forth on scope.
58
meetings in the first three months
The results
58 meetings in the first three months, across Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
That is roughly 19 meetings a month, or four to five every week. Some were held in person while the team was in Riyadh and Dubai. The rest ran online.
Feeders entered a brand new market with a live pipeline of conversations rather than a cold start on the ground, and did it while the Saudi office was still being set up.
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