The organisation buying the technology and the organisation you actually contract with are often two different organisations. Miss that and the deal stalls in a place you can't see.
In a lot of GCC procurement, the path from vendor to customer doesn't run straight. It runs through a local partner, a system integrator, a national champion, sometimes a chain of them. The end customer has a clear preference for your technology, and the deal still flows through an entity with its own commercials, its own relationships, and its own reasons.
Coming from markets where you mostly sell direct, this feels like friction to be removed. It isn't. The channel exists because it carries things the foreign vendor can't: the local entity to contract through, the relationships that took years to build, the on-the-ground delivery, the commercial cover. Treat the partner as an obstacle and you've misread who holds the keys.
The trap is optimising the customer relationship while neglecting the one that actually closes and delivers. You can win the technical evaluation and the customer's heart and still watch it stall, because the partner who has to carry it wasn't brought along, or wasn't given a reason to push.
Two relationships, not one. The customer decides they want it. The channel decides whether it happens.