How Al Noor Trading recovered
340 lost trade show leads and
grew pipeline by 67% in 6 months

Al Noor Trading attends 6–8 industrial trade shows per year across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. For a company that generates 40% of its annual revenue from trade show leads, these events are critical. But for years, their lead capture process was broken in a way nobody had fully measured.

Salespeople collected business cards in pockets and folders. Most cards never made it into their CRM. The ones that did were entered manually — sometimes days after the event, by which point the lead had gone cold or moved to a competitor. The team estimated they were losing 60 to 70 percent of their event leads before any follow-up ever happened.

WhatsApp was their primary communication channel — which was both a strength and a problem. Every salesperson was using a personal number. When a team member resigned, their entire conversation history went with them. Management had no visibility into what was being said to customers or where deals stood. There was no shared inbox, no assignment system, and no way to pick up a conversation someone else had started.

The CRM they were using — a generic SaaS tool — required manual data entry for every contact. Salespeople were spending between 3 and 4 hours per day just entering names, numbers, and notes. Senior salespeople were spending more time updating the CRM than talking to customers.

Follow-up consistency was entirely dependent on individual discipline. There were no automated sequences, no reminders triggered by pipeline stage, and no visibility into which leads had been followed up and which had not. Deals regularly stalled — not because the customer was not interested, but because no one had followed up after the first message.

The sales manager had no real-time visibility into pipeline health. The weekly report was a manually updated spreadsheet that was usually 3–4 days behind reality.