Where ERP Deals Actually Come From

Ask any ERP seller about his pipeline and he will describe his activity: calls made, emails sent, events attended. That is a description of effort, not of outcome.

The right question: of the deals you actually closed, how did each one reach you?

Anyone who answers that honestly once rearranges his week the next day.

Why access got harder

A Gartner survey published on 9 March 2026, built on 646 buyers surveyed between August and September 2025, found that 67% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience for at least part of their journey, and that 45% used AI tools in a recent purchase.

Together the two numbers say one thing: the part of the journey you used to own — introducing, explaining, comparing — is no longer yours. The buyer does it alone, with tools faster than you.

But Gartner published the other side on 20 May 2026: 69% of buyers return to a sales rep to validate AI-generated findings. The rep has not been eliminated; his position moved from the start of the journey to the verification point. Anyone still selling in the register of let me explain what ERP is is offering goods the buyer now gets free in two minutes.

That, incidentally, is why pages like what an ERP system actually is and the ERP systems comparison exist on this site: whoever writes this material is present in the part of the journey the rep does not enter.

The five channels, ranked by return rather than activity

The ranking below is my own estimate from fifteen years in the Egyptian and Emirati markets, and I state plainly that it is experience, not published statistics.

1. Referral from an existing client — the highest closing rate

The deal where somebody tells a peer: talk to this guy. You enter having already passed the trust test before you open your mouth, the cycle halves or better, and price discussion drops to a minimum.

Why do most sellers not get it? Because it does not arrive by asking “do you know anyone?” — that question puts the client in an awkward position and usually produces a name given out of politeness. It arrives when you have made the man look intelligent in front of his peers. Someone whose project succeeded tells the story himself; he needs no prompting from you.

This is the direct link between selling and delivery: whoever sells a scope his team cannot execute has bought his client’s silence forever. It has a station: after the signature.

2. Content that answers a real question — the slowest and most valuable

An article explaining the procurement cycle, or what happens on go-live night, or why projects fail, read by a finance director at two in the morning who is looking for an answer, not a vendor.

Whoever arrives from it has already decided that you know. The cycle is shorter, the price is less contested, and the comparison runs with you rather than against you.

The price of it is that it needs one to two years before it returns anything, and most people who start stop in month four because they measured it monthly. It is a capital asset being built, not a campaign being run.

3. Partnerships and the professional network

The chartered accountant who serves forty companies. The tax advisory office. The hardware supplier. These people see the event months before you do — they see the company struggling with its close, and they see it preparing for due diligence.

The best thing about this channel is that it is built once and produces for years. The most dangerous thing about it is that a relationship resting on commission alone is discovered by the client quickly and burns both parties.

4. Events and exhibitions

Their real value is not in the names collected off the table — most of that is curiosity. It is in who already knew you and saw you standing there, and in twenty minutes with someone it would have taken three months to reach.

Measure them by that, not by badge count. Measure by badges and you will conclude after two years that they do not work, which is a correct conclusion from a wrong measurement.

5. Cold outreach — the lowest closing rate, and not zero

Its conversion is very low for this product specifically, for a structural reason that has nothing to do with your skill: you are calling at a random moment someone who buys on an event. The odds of hitting the week the event occurred are inherently poor.

It is not worthless, on two conditions: call into one narrow sector whose recurring problem you know, and open with a number about their business rather than an introduction of yourself. The gap between “this is so-and-so from such-and-such” and “I work with oil plants in this region and I’ve noticed something about how joint-product costing is calculated” is the gap between an instant hang-up and a conversation.

The story: the deal that arrived two years later

The story is composited from real events, and every identifying detail has been changed.

I wrote a long piece on a narrow accounting problem specific to one sector — the sort that ten people a month read and everyone around you calls a waste of time.

Twenty-two months later a message arrived from a finance director at a group whose name I had never heard. It was four lines, and it contained the sentence that summarises this whole station:

“I read this article about a year ago, when I was at a different company. I’m now at one with exactly the same problem. I need to talk to you.”

He did not comparison-shop. He did not ask for three bids. He asked about price and about timing.

The lesson that matters to you: nobody can attribute that deal to a campaign, a channel, or a quarterly metric. Measured in its fourth month, the article would have been killed. Slow channels are always killed by a fast measurement.

How to split your week

An estimated split I work to, and I present it as an estimate:

• 40% to existing clients and the network — the source of channels one and three, and it does not feel like selling.
• 25% to content — regularly, not in bursts.
• 25% to working live deals with the discipline described in the closing station.
• 10% to focused cold prospecting in a single sector.

Notice what is not in the split: nothing for polishing decks, and nothing for chasing dead deals that make the pipeline look better.

Checklist before you move on

• Write down your last ten closed deals and the channel each came from.
• Compare that list against how you spent last week. Do they match?
• How many existing clients have you spoken to this month with no immediate commercial reason?
• Do you publish something regularly that answers a real question? Since when?
• In cold outreach: do you open with a number about their business, or an introduction of yourself?

Next station

The deal has arrived. The most dangerous conversation in the whole path is the one immediately after, and the striking thing about it is how little you should talk: discovery.