From a back-office desk at SAMACO to running an Audi showroom floor in Saudi Arabia, eleven years in the same brand, the long way up.
Before he sold a single Audi, Mohamed Aref knew exactly what one was worth. In 2014 he joined SAMACO as an Audi Sales Controller in Jeddah, reporting straight to the general manager, and his days were made of reports. Daily national sales figures. Stock reports. Special orders. Commissions. The retail side and the management side of the business, laid out in numbers on a desk, months before he ever shook a customer’s hand.
Then he asked to move to the floor.
That is the small decision the rest of his story turns on. He could have stayed in the safe seat behind the data. Instead he walked out to where the cars are sold, carrying something most new salespeople never have: he already understood the economics of every deal before he learned to close one. He was not guessing at margins or stock. He had built the reports that tracked them.
It showed. Selling for Audi in Saudi Arabia, he was named Best Sales Executive of the Year in 2015, then again in 2016, and again in 2021. He posted top customer-experience scores and clean results in mystery shopping. Audi flew him to Munich for central launch trainings, where he represented the brand at global reveals, the A8, the Q8, and the Q6 e-tron among them. The controller who once read the numbers was now the one putting them on the board.
He did not keep it to himself. From 2019 he worked as an Audi vocational trainer, coaching new Saudi sales executives to the brand’s standard, teaching the floor what he had taught himself. In 2023 he was promoted to Showroom Manager, and in 2024 Audi Middle East certified him as a Sales Manager. An MBA, earned while running the showroom, sits on top of an accounting degree from years earlier.
Ask him what actually changed across eleven years and he does not talk about the cars. He talks about the customer. “Our role has evolved from simply selling a car to becoming trusted advisors,” he says. People arrive now having already researched the vehicle, compared the options, and made up their minds. “Customers expect transparency, personalization, and a seamless experience.” The work now is to earn that trust.
That is also how he leads. He measures a good day by more than the count of cars that left the lot. He measures it by whether the team grew and the customer left believing they were looked after. His advice to anyone starting out is the same thing he built his own career on. “Always focus on people before products,” he says. Learn the car completely, then spend even more time learning how to listen.
The numbers still matter to him. They always did. But he reads them now the way he learned to in that first back-office year, as the quiet truth underneath the handshake, not the point of it. He started by knowing what a car was worth. He spent the next eleven years making sure the person buying it felt the same.
