How enterprise deals
actually close.

1. 01

   Discovery

   Stop pitching. Map the pain to a number and find the person who owns that number. If you can’t name the metric, you don’t have a deal — you have a demo.

2. 02

   Multi-threading

   Single-threaded deals die when your champion changes jobs. Get wide early: economic buyer, technical owner, and the skeptic who will try to kill it.

3. 03

   Champion-building

   A champion isn’t the person who likes you — it’s the person who sells for you in the meetings you’re not in. Arm them with the internal business case, not your slide deck.

4. 04

   Forecasting

   The forecast is a story you tell twice — to your VP and to yourself. Date it to a customer event you can verify, not to the end of your quarter.

5. 05

   Negotiation & procurement

   “Procurement is a formality” is the most expensive sentence in sales. Pre-wire terms with your champion before legal ever sees the paper.

The stages are the theory. The case notes below are the receipts.

Case Notes · How I sell

1. Case 01 · Multi-threading

   Merger year: holding a full enterprise portfolio through the Informa Tech / TechTarget merger

   Context

   December 2024 — Informa Tech merged with TechTarget mid-cycle while I managed the enterprise portfolio.

   Problem

   Mergers are when accounts churn: contacts move on both sides of the table, paper gets redone, competitors circle, and every deal dated to "our quarter end" quietly loses its sponsor. My clients’ practical question was blunt — who owns my program now, and does the plan survive the reorg?

   Strategy

   Treat the merger as multi-threading at portfolio scale: re-map the threads on both sides of every account before the ink dried, and move the plan — not just the contract — across companies.

   Execution

   Cross-functional by necessity: I coordinated across two companies’ systems, contacts, and product lines at once — personal introductions to each new counterpart, account plans carried into the new systems rather than left behind in the old ones, and a new product line absorbed mid-transition.

   Result

   Zero disruption — every high-value account transitioned without interruption. 110% of H1 target; 75% of the annual goal by mid-year.

   What I’d iterate

   Start the counterpart re-mapping the day a merger is announced, not the week it closes. Accounts wired to one contact are the ones a reorg kills; next time I’d pressure-test every single-threaded account first, in writing.

2. Case 02 · Discovery

   Territory growth: 38 to 54 accounts in one year, without losing the average

   Context

   A $3M+ Northwest and California territory across Dark Reading, InformationWeek, Network Computing, and ITPro — clients including Microsoft, AWS, Splunk, Rubrik, Qualys, and Cloudflare.

   Problem

   A growth target that coverage alone couldn’t hit: the buyers behind these brands don’t answer volume, and expansion that dilutes a ~$100k average account isn’t growth — it’s churn with extra steps.

   Strategy

   Run the template below as a system, not a one-off: name the metric, name its owner, get a discovery meeting with that person — before any proposal. Sixteen accounts of deliberate discovery, not sixteen hundred cold emails.

   Execution

   Every target ran on the same one-page plan — metric, owner, threads, customer-side date — worked account by account across the year rather than in one burst, so each close funded the discovery for the next. (The tiering and sequencing behind the sixteen stays offline with the client data; the method itself is the template.)

   Result

   16 net-new accounts in a single year (38 → 54, +42%); revenue up 28% year over year at a $100k average account. Breadth, not one lucky whale.

   What I’d iterate

   Codify the sequencing on day one instead of by year end. The system turned out to be repeatable — written down earlier, another seller could have run it beside me, which is the real test of a playbook.

3. Case 03 · Full cycle

   Standing start: opening a new customer segment with no existing book

   Context

   2018 — a business-development seat with no accounts handed over: new-business development for an emerging customer segment across the UBM events and media portfolio.

   Problem

   No inherited book means no inherited discovery, no warm threads, and no pipeline to hide behind — every deal had to be self-sourced from first conversation to signature, in a segment the portfolio hadn’t sold to before.

   Strategy

   Run the full cycle deliberately — sourcing, first meeting, business case, close — treating each stage of the guide above as a checklist rather than a theory.

   Execution

   Ran every deal end to end myself, which is where the stages above stopped being theory and became reflexes.

   Result

   Revenue targets met and the segment established. Promoted to Sales Manager within the year.

   What I’d iterate

   Write the segment playbook down as I went, not in hindsight. The fastest deals repeated a pattern I only named afterward — naming it in month two would have made the seat handoff-ready from the start.

Sanitized on purpose: client-specific figures and deal terms stay out. Every number here is my own, from my résumé, and matches LinkedIn.

Take it · The working system