Topic
Leadership
15 essays tagged “Leadership”.
- How to Run a Program Reset Without Losing the Customer
Enterprise deliveries go sideways. The reset conversation is the most important one an account team will have with a customer. Most handle it by generating optimism. The ones that work generate clarity.
- Write the Account Plan for the Account, Not the Forecast Call
Most account plans exist to satisfy an internal process. The ones that actually help the account team are built to answer a different set of questions, and they get rewritten when the account changes, not when the quarter ends.
- The Discovery Call Is a Diagnostic, Not an Interview
Most discovery calls are information extraction exercises: the AE asks a list of questions, the customer answers, and both sides leave with the same understanding they arrived with. The good ones work differently.
- The Deal You Have to Sell Twice
Enterprise AEs spend most of their time selling to customers. The deals that close also require selling internally: to resourcing, to leadership, to the partner team. This is the part that most account planning frameworks skip.
- Why the Biggest Q1 Deals Rarely Close in Q2
Every January has the same shape: a pipeline full of deals that feel transformative and a Q2 that looks increasingly familiar by March. The pattern is structural, not motivational.
- The Customer Who Will Expand and the One Who Will Not
The signals are visible in the first engagement. Most account teams are not looking for them because they are focused on closing, not on reading what the relationship is actually built on.
- How to Run a Proof-of-Concept That Moves a Deal Forward
Most PoCs stall deals rather than close them. The problem is almost never technical. A PoC that is designed to prove technology answers the wrong question.
- The Organizational Pattern Behind Every Platform Deal That Dies in Contracting
The technical win is real. The champion is genuine. The architecture team loved it. Then contracting starts and the deal goes quiet for ten weeks. This is not a contracting problem.
- What the Executives Who Build Durable Partnerships Do Differently
Some enterprise technology relationships last a decade and define how an organization competes. Most last three years and end in a procurement review. The difference is visible from the first meeting.
- Read the Annual Report Before the First Meeting
Most enterprise AEs use the annual report to find the CEO's name and the company's headcount. That's not what it's for.
- Nine Languages, One Practice: Notes on Operating Multilingually
Running an enterprise consulting practice across nine languages and four time zones teaches you things about organizational design that monolingual environments cannot.
- The Technical Seller Advantage: Why Engineers Who Can Sell Win
The most effective sellers in enterprise technology are not traditional salespeople. They are engineers who learned to connect technical depth with business outcomes.
- How to Sell Cloud Transformation to Executives Who Have Been Burned Before
Most cloud transformation pitches fail because they lead with technology. Executives who have seen failed migrations need a different conversation entirely.
- Enterprise AI Adoption: The Gap Between Demo and Production
Most enterprise AI initiatives stall not because of model quality, but because of data readiness, organizational resistance, and unclear ROI expectations.
- Why Cloud Architecture Decisions Are Business Decisions
Every architectural choice in the cloud carries business implications. Most technical teams know this in the abstract and ignore it in practice.