Notes on entering Central Asian markets
Numbers, frameworks, and BizDev practice for B2B Enterprise IT. No fluff, no buzzwords.
The decision is made a year before the tender
A tender goes out after the money is allocated and the task has been written in someone else's words. Here's the budget cycle of a Kazakhstani corporation, the six filters that quietly stop deals, and why your main competitor is the customer's own IT team.
How to tell if Kazakhstan will buy — before the first deal
«Interesting, send it over» is usually a polite no. Using the Mom Test method, here's how to tell real demand from noise, why a «no» is harder to hear in Kazakhstan, and which signals are worth more than words.
What it actually costs to test a new market
Hiring one salesperson looks like the cheap way to test demand. Using Gartner numbers and Ghemawat's CAGE framework, here's why it runs to 25 million KZT and six months — and where the test should start instead.