★★★★★
"Joel from Essence Automations designed an amazing website for our hardware business. He also created a Google Business Profile and optimized it so well, Oloolua Hardware is now ranking number 2 in Ngong."
You have the stock, the prices and the shipping sorted. What you do not have is somebody in Nairobi who knows which companies to call, speaks the language, and keeps chasing until there is an order. That is us. You also get the system we run it on, so you can watch every bit of it.
Most exporters we speak to have already tried. The pattern is almost always the same.
You know your product suits fleets, workshops and contractors. You do not know which ones exist, who runs buying, or which of them actually pay on time. So you end up guessing, or waiting for enquiries that trickle in.
A yard manager in Mombasa or Arusha answers a phone, and answers WhatsApp even faster. He rarely answers a cold email from a company he has never heard of, in a country he has never visited. Email alone reaches the procurement desks and misses the workshops entirely.
Buyers here have been burned by suppliers who took a deposit and vanished. You have the same worry in reverse. A local voice that can be called back, and an office address in Nairobi, settles most of that in one conversation.
Hiring a rep or appointing a distributor means salary, commitment and very little visibility. If it does not work you find out months later, and you never really know whether the market said no or the agent did nothing.
Nothing about how you sell changes. We sit in front of your sales process, not inside it.
Which buyers, which countries, which sizes. You also hand over your existing customers so they are marked off from day one and never counted as ours.
Real companies with the real decision maker named, not an info@ address. Fleets, workshops, distributors, contractors, relief agencies, whatever fits your product.
Three things running together: email prospecting to open the door, calls in English and Swahili at the hours people here actually answer, and WhatsApp, which is the only channel a lot of yards and workshops ever reply on. Every touch written up on the buyer's card.
When a buyer is ready to talk, the meeting goes straight into your calendar with reminders on both sides. You walk in with the full history in front of you.
Not a list of tools you have to learn. A team doing the work, with the whole thing visible to you as it happens.
Nairobi is one hour behind Dubai and in the same working day as Mumbai and Istanbul. When your buyer picks up, you can be on the call.
English and Swahili, from a local number, on the phone and on WhatsApp. A Nairobi yard treats a Gulf number as a scam call and a local one as a supplier, and half of them would rather reply on WhatsApp than pick up at all.
Nairobi is where the region does business, from regional head offices to the aid agencies that buy in volume. Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia are covered by one team.
We are not selling you a theory. These are the channels Essence Automations grows on, and there is a fair chance one of them is how you ended up reading this page.
Finding the right companies, then the right person inside them, and opening a conversation by email. Researched lists, not bought ones, and never a blast to info@ addresses.
Once a buyer is on your list they should hear from you again: new stock lines, price changes, a reason to reorder. Quiet, regular, and written so it does not read like a newsletter nobody asked for.
The same idea as an email campaign, on the app people here actually open. New stock lines and reorder nudges sent to buyers who already know you, in batches you approve, never a blast.
Replies, calls answered and meetings held. We hold our own outreach to the numbers on this page, which is why we are comfortable printing them.
The machine that finds our clients is the machine we would point at your buyers. We are not asking you to believe in something we do not use ourselves.
On day one you get your own workspace, with a login for you and one for anyone on your team. Every buyer we find and every conversation we have goes into it, and you can open it from Dubai, Mumbai or a plane at any hour. Hiring a rep or appointing a distributor gives you none of this.
You and your team get accounts on the system from the first week. No waiting for us to send something, no version of the truth that we control and you do not.
A card per company, moving from first contact to order confirmed. Open it and you see who we spoke to, what they buy, what they pay now and when we are calling back.
Tap "9 meetings booked" and you get the nine, with dates. Tap "needs attention" and you get the buyers nobody has touched in a week. No monthly slide deck, just the live thing.
Every buyer is tagged with how we found them. After a few months you know exactly which way of reaching this market works, and we can put more into it.
We show email opens but we also tell you they are soft, because some mail apps open messages on their own. Replies, calls answered and meetings held are the numbers we ask to be judged on.
Contacts, call notes and the full history, handed over in a format you can actually use.
Need a stage renamed or a report cut differently? That happens the same week, not never.
When they walk away, your customers walk with them. Here the market knowledge stays on your side.
The usual complaint about an agent abroad is silence between updates. There is no between here, because you are looking at the same thing we are.
Open the pipeline at midnight from Dubai and see exactly what we see, as it happens. Every buyer, every call note, every meeting booked. You never have to ask how the month is going.
A buyer who wants a price, a question we cannot answer, a competitor's quote we keep running into. That reaches you the same day, not in next week's summary. Anything needing your decision is never sat on.
Buyers added, emails sent and replied to, calls made and answered, meetings booked and held, deals quoted and won, and what we are changing next month because of what we learned.
Thirty minutes at the end of each month, on camera, going through the pipeline together and agreeing what to chase next. Included, and as often as you want it.
These are ranges, not promises. Anyone who guarantees you orders in a market they have not tested is guessing, and you should be careful with them.
Opens look far higher, but some mail apps open messages by themselves. We judge on replies, and so should you.
Calling is what turns a quiet list into conversations in this region. It is the reason we push it rather than just offer it.
Five to ten on the sales team plan, eight to fifteen with a full-time caller, once the first month of setup and warm-up is behind us.
The first month is setup, list building and warming up a new sending domain. Buyers here also run on order cycles, so a fleet that restocked last month will talk to you next quarter. Three months is the first fair read.
A first order from a new supplier is usually small, on purpose. They are testing you. The money is in the reorder, which is exactly why our success fee runs across twelve months rather than one invoice.
They take a margin, own the customer relationship and often sit on your stock while pushing whatever sells easiest. If it goes quiet you have no way of knowing whether the market said no or nobody tried.
Salary, contract, equipment and management from four time zones away, before you know whether the market wants your product. Recruiting well in a country you do not know is its own project.
A stand at a regional expo costs more than a year of this and gives you a pile of cards, most of which never get called because nobody at home has the time.
A month to month cost, people on the ground who call in the local language, everything visible on your own screen, and no one standing between you and the buyer. Stop whenever you like and the list stays yours.
We would rather turn down a month's fee than take one from someone we cannot help. If any of these is true, say so on the first call and we will tell you straight.
This is built for selling to companies, where there is a named person to call. If you need shoppers rather than businesses, you want advertising, not a sales team.
New buyers here test with a small order before they trust you. If your minimum is a full container from day one, most of the market cannot say yes, however good the pitch.
We can find buyers who value genuine parts and proper documentation. We cannot fix being three times the price of what is already on the shelf in Nairobi.
Warm-up alone takes two to three weeks, and buyers move at their own pace. If the pressure is that immediate, spend the money on a trade show instead.
Essence Automations is a Nairobi team. We have spent the last few years building sales and customer systems for businesses here, which is the same work, pointed at buyers on our doorstep instead of yours.
The pipeline you would use is not a rented subscription with our logo on it. We built it, so when you need a stage renamed or a report cut differently, it happens that week.
Nairobi based, on Kenyan numbers, in the same market as your buyers. When something needs a person in a room, there is a person in a room.
The success fee means a quiet quarter costs us as well as you. That is deliberate. It keeps us honest about which buyers are worth chasing.
"Our sales process is now more streamlined with the CRM offered by Joel. The training and after sales services are top notch. We are happy to recommend and work with him again."
Raphael Opiyo · Opentech Global Services · public Google review
Most of these are Kenyan businesses rather than exporters, because that is where we have been building. The same team, and the same habit of doing what we said we would.
Billed in US dollars. The monthly can be paused or stopped whenever you like, and your buyer list stays yours.
Everything needed before the first buyer is contacted.
Research, outreach, and calls to the buyers worth ringing.
A caller on the phone every working day, not just the shortlist.
On accounts we bring you, worked out on what was actually invoiced and paid.
For twelve months, because in this trade the money is in the reorder, not the trial order.
You list them before we start and they are excluded permanently. You never pay a fee on business you already had.
You never work any of it out. You enter what an account was invoiced and the system decides first order against repeat, applies the rate, counts the twelve months and prints the statement we invoice against. We go through it together once a month, off the same screen you use to watch the work.
No. We hold no stock, take no title and never come between you and the buyer. We find the buyer and get them talking to you. You quote, you invoice, you ship, and the relationship is yours.
Before anything starts you give us your existing customers and anyone you have quoted in the last year. Those are excluded permanently.
Every company we then approach is recorded in your pipeline with the date and how we found them, and you can see that list the whole time. If one of them buys later it counts, whether they replied to an email, took a call, or walked into your office themselves. We reconcile it together each month, in the open.
Not on commission alone, and you should be wary of anyone who says yes to that. Finding your buyers costs real money before a single order exists: the sending domain and inboxes, the research tools, the phone bill, and people's time. Somebody who agrees to carry all of that for free is either about to disappear on you or will quietly spend their effort on whichever client is actually paying.
What we do is keep the monthly deliberately low and take a success fee on top, so a good quarter pays us properly and a quiet one does not. That is as close to commission only as anyone can honestly go while still covering the domain, the inboxes, the tools and the phone bill that exist whether or not an order lands.
Week one is setup. Weeks two and three the list is built and the sending reputation is warmed up, and calling starts on the best names. First meetings usually land in week four.
Real judgement should come at 90 days. Buyers here run on relationships and order cycles, and a fleet that has just restocked will talk to you next quarter, not this week.
No, and we would advise against it. We buy a separate domain close to your name and build its sending reputation over two to three weeks. That way outreach volume never touches the address your existing customers write to, so your ordinary quotes and invoices keep landing in inboxes. The domain is registered to your company, not to us, and stays yours if we part ways.
That is usually fine. We work the buyers they are not covering, and their accounts go straight onto the excluded list. Several exporters use us to test a market properly before deciding whether an agent is worth keeping.
Anything sold business to business where a buyer can be named and called: vehicle and machinery parts, building materials, tools and workshop supplies, generators and power equipment, agricultural machinery, medical and laboratory supplies, packaging. If your buyers are consumers rather than companies, we are the wrong fit and will say so.
Not in the same product line and the same country while we are working for you. If we are selling filters and brake parts into Kenya for you, we will not take on another parts supplier there.
We will keep working with businesses in other trades, and we will tell you plainly if an enquiry comes in that sits close to your patch, so you hear it from us rather than from a buyer. If you want a wider lock than that, it is a conversation about price, not a flat no.
This is the fear behind most hesitation about Africa, and it is a fair one. We check what we can before you spend time on anyone: how long the company has traded, whether the yard and the fleet are real, who owns it, and what people in the trade say about how they settle.
What we will not do is pretend that is a credit guarantee. We are finding you buyers, not underwriting them. The terms you offer on a first order are your call, and our honest advice is the same one local suppliers follow: start small, get paid, then extend. That is also why our fee is weighted towards repeat orders, since a buyer who pays and comes back is worth more to us than one who places a big first order and disappears.
A normal invoice in US dollars, paid by bank transfer or Wise, whichever is cheaper at your end. Setup is half to begin and half on go-live. The monthly runs from go-live. Success fees are invoiced after we have gone through the month together and you have agreed the figures, never before.
A reasonable worry, because we are talking to buyers in a market you cannot see. So we are not pretending to be you. Our people use their own names and introduce themselves as your East Africa sales team, which is exactly what they are. Nobody invents a colleague who does not exist.
Beyond that: if a buyer asks something we do not know, we say we will check with you rather than guessing at a price or a lead time, and every message we send and every call we make is written up on that buyer's card so you can read what was said. Our fee only pays if buyers keep ordering, so burning your name for one quick order would cost us more than it made us.
Our success fee only pays if buyers keep ordering. Burning your reputation for a quick first order would cost us more than it made us.
No, and most of our clients never have. Meetings run on video, and buyers here are used to that. It does help later: once a few accounts are running, a week of visits with meetings we line up for you will usually close more than any email. We will tell you when we think that trip is worth booking, and not before.
Yes, any month. There is no lock-in. Your buyer list, the notes and the whole history stay yours and we hand them over. The only thing that continues is the success fee on accounts we already brought you, for the twelve months agreed.
Send us your product range and the countries you are after. We will come back with the kind of buyers we would go after, roughly how many there are, and what we think is realistic in the first 90 days. No charge for that.
You will be dealing with Joel Muthee directly, not a sales rep. [email protected] · +254 720 615 606