A twelve-month program to build a £1.6M partnership pipeline of APAC airlines for Sherpa.
Sherpa makes airlines money and takes a cost off their plate: it turns travel requirements and eVisas into an ancillary-revenue line, and it stops passengers reaching the gate without the right documents. NO BS strengthens that pipeline by taking Sherpa straight to the three owners who each feel a different side of it, at the carriers across nine priority markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and New Zealand.
Owners
Projections
The fundamentals
The program at a glance
What you get
Target list. Named commercial, digital & customer leaders across APAC's carriers.
The access. Senior, in-person sessions convened and co-led by Sherpa and NO BS.
Meetings. Qualified 1-on-1s, tracked by name and stage in your CRM.
Reporting. A live dashboard of all activity, plus weekly progress meetings.
Why it works
The model. Give before you take: senior access peers can't reach on their own.
Validated. Proven with senior leaders across APAC, see the proof.
Conversion. 70% of participants to 1-on-1s; 40% of those to CRM opportunities.
Scale. ~3,900 senior airline leaders across the three briefs in 9 priority markets (airlines only).
Why it's low risk
Cost. £5K per month for twelve months, a predictable, defined line item.
Payback. Projected signed value is ~7× the £60k annual fee.
Phased. Priority markets first, expandable across all of APAC once proven.
Transparent. Every name, stage and week visible, nothing in a black box.
APAC airlines are the prize. Reaching the people who sign is the hard part.
Sherpa's growth in APAC runs on net-new airline partnerships, embedding travel requirements and eVisa monetization into the booking flow. Across APAC (ex-India), that is decided by a finite set of commercial, digital and customer leaders at roughly 73 carriers.
That means net-new airline logos, and net-new is the hardest pipeline there is to build.
Why is net-new hard?
Senior airline leaders are hard to reach
Partnership decisions sit with commercial, digital and customer chiefs, each juggling a booking engine, a PSS vendor and a dozen existing partners. The case for Sherpa has to be made in person, peer to peer.
Everyone is chasing them
The same small population of airline decision-makers gets bombarded daily by travel-tech vendors with AI-powered emails, InMails, whitepapers, webinars and conference invites.
Net-new is nobody's job
Lean sales teams and long airline sales cycles push focus to live accounts. A Sherpa champion has to build the internal case across commercial, digital and ops, work that needs time, energy and senior networks a BD hire doesn't naturally have.
Give before you take.
Behind every airline partnership that closes in this region is a high-level peer-to-peer relationship. You can't build that relationship by making asks, you need to offer something of value first.
Spearfish in a small elite pond, not hit-and-hope
Decision making in APAC is top heavy. A dozen of the right people in an intimate setting beats a thousand badge scans.
Reach out like a peer
A real message from a real peer, about something they care about. Not InMail, not AI-slop emails, definitely not cold calls.
Offer something they want, not something you want to give
A real conversation on real issues with real peers. Not whitepapers, webinars or demos.
Share your point of view
Project credibility through your point of view, told through stories, experience and insight. No slide decks.
Earn the 1-on-1, never demand it
You've built credibility, authority and goodwill before your ask. The follow-up is more organic and more to-the-point because they already know and respect your point of view.
This isn't theoretical. We convene the exact senior rooms, then convert them.
Our playbook is simple: convene the senior people you need to reach into a room they actually want to be in, then convert. Here is that motion working across clients, industries and geographies, the same motion we would run for Sherpa with APAC airline leaders.
Who was in the room
The proof point: the motion, convene then convert, senior commercial and marketing leaders in a room they wanted to be in.
In the room: peers across consumer brands, platforms and agencies.
More proof points
Integrate: CEO dinner event in Singapore
An evening for B2B marketing leaders, co-hosted with the CEO of Integrate, on the revenue impact of trusted marketing data. View the post on LinkedIn ↗
In the room:
Serious Fluence: Creator marketing lunch in KL
A private lunch in Kuala Lumpur, co-hosted with the CEO of Serious Fluence, for B2C marketing leaders, on creator marketing. View the post on LinkedIn ↗
In the room:
Gimmefy: Brand marketer lunch in Singapore
A lunch event in Singapore, co-hosted by the CEO of Gimmefy, for brand marketers navigating the shift to AI. View the post on LinkedIn ↗
In the room:
Your buyers, airlines only: senior leaders across nine priority markets.
The airlines in your nine priority markets, filtered to the carriers themselves, with no airports, ground handlers or vendors. We size the senior owners (Director, VP, CXO) of the three briefs a Sherpa deal runs through, chosen because each owns a distinct part of the case: Commercial & Ancillary owns the eVisa/ancillary-revenue upside (the fastest yes, since it adds revenue); Digital & E-commerce owns the booking-flow and website integration; and Customer & Travel-Ready owns the passenger experience and the denied-boarding / travel-requirements problem.
| Market | Digital & E-commerce | Commercial & Ancillary | Customer & Travel-Ready | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 321 | 558 | 184 | 1,063 |
| Malaysia | 197 | 288 | 73 | 558 |
| Hong Kong | 177 | 261 | 73 | 511 |
| Indonesia | 174 | 277 | 50 | 501 |
| Singapore | 171 | 195 | 46 | 412 |
| New Zealand | 99 | 160 | 45 | 304 |
| Philippines | 60 | 120 | 44 | 224 |
| Vietnam | 54 | 117 | 28 | 199 |
| Thailand | 36 | 76 | 18 | 130 |
| Total (9 markets) | 1,289 | 2,052 | 561 | 3,902 |
Methodology. LinkedIn Sales Navigator, September 2026. Company filter = each market’s carriers, matched to their LinkedIn company pages, so results are airline employees only, with airports, ground handlers, MRO and software vendors excluded. Seniority = Director, VP or CXO. Each brief is a boolean keyword search across the profile (title-weighted): Digital & E-commerce = digital, e-commerce, online; Commercial & Ancillary = ancillary, merchandising, retailing, commercial, loyalty; Customer & Travel-Ready = customer experience, passenger experience, ground operations, travel ready. Counts are indicative, and because a person can match more than one brief the three columns can overlap and are not additive across. Thailand reads low because Thai airline staff have thinner English-language LinkedIn presence, not because the carriers are small. Rows in the table are sorted by Total (the sum of the three briefs, which overlap, so it is not a de-duplicated headcount). Named, de-duplicated lists per carrier are built on kickoff.
Appendix. The full account universe, 73 target carriers across 21 markets (ex-India). The nine priority markets above are sized in detail; the rest are pipeline for later phases.
| Country | # | Target carriers |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 2 | Singapore Airlines, Scoot |
| Hong Kong | 4 | Cathay Pacific, HK Express, Hong Kong Airlines, Greater Bay Airlines |
| Japan | 6 | Japan Airlines, ANA, Peach, ZIPAIR, Jetstar Japan, Skymark |
| South Korea | 7 | Korean Air, Asiana, Jin Air, T'way Air, Jeju Air, Air Premia, Air Busan |
| China | 8 | Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Hainan, Xiamen Air, Juneyao, Spring, Sichuan |
| Taiwan | 5 | EVA Air, China Airlines, STARLUX, Tigerair Taiwan, Mandarin Airlines |
| Thailand | 6 | Thai Airways, Bangkok Airways, Thai AirAsia, Thai Vietjet, Thai Lion Air, Nok Air |
| Malaysia | 5 | Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, AirAsia X, Batik Air, Firefly |
| Indonesia | 6 | Garuda Indonesia, Lion Air, Citilink, Batik Air Indonesia, Super Air Jet, TransNusa |
| Philippines | 4 | Philippine Airlines, Cebu Pacific, AirAsia Philippines, PAL Express |
| Vietnam | 5 | Vietnam Airlines, VietJet Air, Bamboo Airways, Pacific Airlines, Vietravel Airlines |
| Australia | 4 | Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin Australia, Rex |
| New Zealand | 1 | Air New Zealand |
| Sri Lanka | 1 | SriLankan Airlines |
| Maldives | 3 | Maldivian, Manta Air, FlyMe |
| Fiji | 1 | Fiji Airways |
| Brunei | 1 | Royal Brunei Airlines |
| Cambodia | 1 | Cambodia Angkor Air |
| Macau | 1 | Air Macau |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 | Air Niugini |
| Mongolia | 1 | MIAT Mongolian Airlines |
| 21 markets | 73 |
Where we'd start, and how fast.
The ICP puts a real number on it: thousands of senior leaders (Dir/VP/CXO) across the airlines in nine priority markets, deepest in commercial & ancillary. Here is the sequence.
How we'd phase it across 12 months
Phase 1 (0–3 months): Singapore & Malaysia.
Phase 2 (4–6 months): Hong Kong & Australia.
Phase 3 (6–12 months): Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and New Zealand.
Within each phase, the motion:
- Find the right peopleBuild the named target list from the ICP: the exact commercial, digital and customer leaders worth a room.
- Reach out like a peerReal messages from real people to the few who matter, not a sequence tool running on its own.
- Convene the roomSmall, senior, co-hosted sessions at APAC travel and aviation-commerce moments, the kind of room they actually want to be in.
- Earn the 1-on-1Every room converts into named 1-on-1s, and we sit in every meeting that matters.
- Live trackingDashboards on activity, conversion and deal progression in your CRM, so you always see the pipeline.
- Weekly updates with usA standing weekly check-in where we walk the numbers together and agree the next moves.
What the program is worth, in your terms.
NO BS takes full accountability for the top of this funnel. The defaults below reflect what we typically see, but move the sliders to your own numbers to get a real view of what this NO BS x Sherpa collaboration could produce.
Default sliders reflect our working estimate over 12 months: 12 rooms × 8 senior airline leaders is about 96 reached, 80% to a real 1-on-1 (77), 40% of those to a partnership opportunity (31), about a 25% win rate on close (8). At a £50,000 average ACV that is £1.6M in pipeline and £400k of signed annual partnership value. Move the sliders to your own numbers.
Operators, not consultants.
Most firms sell you a plan. We are the team that executes it, in the room, from month one.
Moving Asia from strategy deck to P&L.
More on NO BS ↗
Yuri Bhanage, CEO
NO BS works with sales leaders and founders to execute sales motions that actually convert in Asia. We don't advise from the sidelines or theorise about markets, we work in them, running outbound, establishing high-level relationships, building pipeline and closing deals.
Led by CEO Yuri Bhanage, who brings 15+ years of hands-on sales experience in Asia, across SE Asia, China, India and the US, from Fortune 500 to seed-stage startups. Selling to enterprise clients like AIA, Accenture, EY, KPMG, Braze, Almosafer, American Express and New Relic. Connect on LinkedIn ↗
Shyam Kumar, Advisor
As Managing Partner at Uplifting Service (Ron Kaufman’s global customer-experience firm), Shyam has brought major carriers onto large-scale CX transformation programs, including Singapore Airlines, Fiji Airways, Garuda Indonesia, Malaysia Airlines and Qantas. Connect on LinkedIn ↗
Rahul Gokhale, Director
Brings a senior operating perspective from large, complex organizations, with leadership roles at Microsoft, Zendesk, KPMG, Deloitte and Korn Ferry across customer success, partnerships, transformation and leadership. Connect on LinkedIn ↗
Case studies
Serious Fluence
50 meetings in 3 months with senior B2C marketing leaders from the likes of Google, Airwallex, Samsonite and Estée Lauder.
ByteDance
30 meetings in 3 months with founders and CTOs for the BytePlus AI product, 5 progressing to POC stage.
WhyQ
Built an outbound enterprise sales motion from scratch, leading to a US$200K+ enterprise deal closed in the first 3 months.
Why NO BS
Results from month one
Outreach, meetings and pipeline building from day 1, landing in the first month, not after a long ramp.
Enterprise access, without the overhead
Reach the top levels of the enterprises you want, without investing millions in a market-development team to get there.
Results that count, not theories
Meetings, opportunities and deals, tracked by name. Not market theories or a strategy deck that sits on a shelf.
What we'd need from you.
We can get into a lot more detail from here, but four questions first.
- Do the projected outcomes align with your targets?
- What questions do you have on our approach?
- How big a priority is this for you?
- What budget can you allocate to achieve these outcomes?