I doubt the agency landed any real clients as the companies Ali claimed to have access to through personal connections and past experience likely stick with vetted design agencies and probably have fairly extensive contract procedures. If Ali had focused on low to mid-tier clients they may have been able to land some contracts, my two cents.
I would expect that the sales people did focus on mid-tier clients. After all, if they would have approached high-tier clients Ali supposedly had connections with I would expect the responses to show that this isn't real.
Salespeople work hard to generate leads for Ali and his imaginary cofounder. Ali doesn't follow up. Or maybe he does follow up on one or two that sound like they'll be fun, but the cynical mid-tier firm marketing execs see right though him or his pitch is just a bit too average.
I assume the sales team operated like a third party leadgen operation: salespeople spam the market, forward on the handful of responses and have no further involvement in the sales process. If they're getting good performance metrics and being told the company execs are on the cusp of closing big deals based on their work there's not much reason to question them, especially if they're from a different continent and culture but they've been promised a visa and a Western salary once they've passed their first six months.
> What I do not understand how could an enterprise be so incompetent not to attract any clients in 6 months?
Most likely in my opinion: they priced themselves out of the market by raising the rates quoted to potential clients in an attempt to cover the ballooning overhead. It wouldn't do to actually land contracts and still go out of business, now would it?
Another possibility: They responded to RFPs with proposals that drastically expanded the scope of what was requested (same motivation as above).
There are ways to push clients a bit out of their comfort zone and still get their business, but if what was asked for is a new logo and you respond with a proposal for a global corporate identity system and advertising campaign, you might not get very far.
You have 20-30 very motivated sales people working on landing clients for 6 months, there have to be some sales.
Or did this not-quite an agency actually land some real clients and was unable to deliver?