Latin America - unsolicited international origination (Dec 2025–present, dormant)
The situation
A multi-brand distributor in Chile, part of the OEM's global retail organisation - managing seven automotive brands - became a prospective client through a former regional MD who had relocated from Singapore to Santiago. No RFP, no inbound enquiry, no international sales mandate, no travel budget. A country on the opposite side of the world, twelve time zones away, evaluating a platform built for Southeast Asian automotive aftersales.
What was done
A discovery questionnaire (Dec 2025) surfaced the anchor problem: roughly 70% of their customer database was outdated. The proposal was built as an "Initiation Playback" - structured to mirror their own discovery responses section by section - anchored on a "Claim My Car" self-verification flow to solve the database problem directly. Subscription model, USD $3,000/month, 36-month term, no upfront fee, with a pre-built Phase 2 menu (queue management, lead management, DMS integration, multi-brand) presented as optional future scope rather than included cost. A 45-minute live demonstration call followed on 30 March 2026; both decision-makers - the project lead and their IT/Technology Manager - had read the full proposal beforehand, and their questions were operational ("what happens when we do this") rather than evaluative.
Scoped conservatively, deliberately
Asked directly what was missing from the quote, I declined to upsell - "what you have now is good enough to start; I won't push more until you've worked with me." The Phase 2 paths were already written; keeping them out of base scope kept the commitment manageable and the delivery risk low.
Cross-border commercial structuring
The proposal carried its own operational layer underneath the headline pricing - Chilean cross-border tax treatment for digital services, USD billing to avoid both ringgit and Chilean peso exposure, arbitration jurisdiction, commercial model and billing cycle. None of this was escalated upward. The work sat with me because the combination of context required to do it correctly - the deal mechanics, the OEM's retail organisation governance environment, the platform's existing commercial structure, and the cross-border tax operational knowledge built over twelve years of handling Malaysian SST, foreign-services treatment, and digital tax - didn't exist anywhere else in the group.
The roadblock, stated plainly
The engagement is currently dormant, and not for reasons inside the deal. both national sales companies engaged us before the OEM's global retail organisation tightened its IT-vendor governance; Chile faces a stricter evaluation gate than the earlier accounts did, and the deal now sits inside their internal business-case and GM-approval process, with the OEM's retail organisation Brazil involved in the evaluation. I built a reference chain mapped to that approval structure - the Singapore IT director for governance credibility, a senior Malaysian operational figure for the business case - and was transparent with the Chile team about the friction the existing accounts had navigated, rather than presenting a frictionless reference.
What this shows
A platform built for one region drew unsolicited interest from another hemisphere on the strength of the proposal and the architecture alone. The constraint on this deal is external OEM-governance politics, not product fit or commercial structure - and the same global-governance dynamic that blocks it here is the one the engagement platform is being positioned to pass formally elsewhere.