https://murateksi.com/tags/sales/Recent content in Sales on Murat EksiHugoen-usSat, 09 May 2026 18:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/account-plan-for-the-account/Sat, 09 May 2026 18:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/account-plan-for-the-account/The account plan as most organizations practice it is a document that exists to demonstrate to management that the account team has a plan. It is reviewed at the beginning of the year, updated at mid-year, and referenced again during QBR season. It contains the right sections: whitespace analysis, organizational map, strategic objectives, opportunity list, competitive positioning. It is usually accurate at the point it is written and increasingly fictional by the time it is reviewed.https://murateksi.com/posts/discovery-call-diagnostic/Sat, 09 May 2026 16:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/discovery-call-diagnostic/The discovery call template most enterprise AEs use is a list of questions. Budget, authority, need, timeline. Current state, desired state, gap analysis. Pain points, priorities, decision criteria. The questions are reasonable and the answers are useful. The problem is that the customer can see what you are doing and it does not build the kind of trust that moves a complex deal forward. An interview extracts information from a subject.https://murateksi.com/posts/internal-selling/Sat, 09 May 2026 14:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/internal-selling/Every enterprise deal that closes requires two sales. The first is visible: the commercial conversation with the customer, the architecture reviews, the business case, the contracting. The second is nearly invisible to anyone outside the account team: the internal sale that gets the deal the resources, the attention, and the organizational commitment it needs to actually deliver. Most account planning frameworks cover the first sale in detail. Discovery, qualification, stakeholder mapping, champion development, closing.https://murateksi.com/posts/q1-pipeline-illusion/Sat, 09 May 2026 11:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/q1-pipeline-illusion/By the second week of January, the enterprise sales pipeline looks like it always does: full of enormous deals that are finally moving after the Q4 freeze, newly prioritized initiatives with executive sponsors who are energized after the year-end planning cycle, and customer conversations that have shifted from “let’s revisit this in the new year” to “yes, now is the right time.” By the second week of March, the Q2 forecast is already revealing itself.https://murateksi.com/posts/customers-who-expand/Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/customers-who-expand/Account expansion is supposed to be simple. Deliver well, earn trust, grow the relationship. The formula is repeated in every sales methodology and every QBR template. It is also incomplete in a way that causes most account teams to misread their book and misallocate their time. The customer who expands and the customer who does not are usually indistinguishable at the point of initial close. Both are genuinely excited about the platform.https://murateksi.com/posts/poc-engagement-that-moves-deals/Sun, 03 May 2026 16:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/poc-engagement-that-moves-deals/The PoC graveyard is full of technically successful projects. The architecture was sound. The performance metrics exceeded the benchmarks. The delivery team did excellent work. The customer’s engineering lead sent a glowing summary to the account team. And then nothing happened for eight weeks, and then a request to extend the evaluation, and then a change in internal priorities, and then the deal died. A technically successful PoC that does not close a deal is not a failure of execution.https://murateksi.com/posts/platform-deals-die-in-contracting/Sun, 03 May 2026 14:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/platform-deals-die-in-contracting/The pattern is consistent enough that I can describe it before the AE does. The deal ran for four months. The technical evaluation was rigorous and went well. The customer’s architecture team recommended the platform. The champion sent a message saying the hard part was done and it was now just a matter of getting the paperwork sorted. That was eight weeks ago. Since then: silence, then a brief message about internal process, then a request to pause, then nothing.https://murateksi.com/posts/executives-who-build-durable-partnerships/Sun, 03 May 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/executives-who-build-durable-partnerships/In six years of enterprise cloud sales across EMEA, I have worked with two kinds of senior technology executives. The first kind builds technology partnerships that define their organization’s capabilities for the next decade. The second kind reviews vendor contracts every three years, runs competitive procurement cycles, and is perpetually disappointed by the results. Both kinds of executive are intelligent, well-resourced, and trying to make good decisions. The difference is not competence.https://murateksi.com/posts/annual-report-primary-source/Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/annual-report-primary-source/The annual report is the primary source document for enterprise selling. I read three of my largest customers’ annual reports every year, in full, before their next planning cycle starts. I have never met another AE who does this systematically. That gap is not an accident. Annual reports are long, dense, and require you to hold more than a single sentence in mind at once. Most enterprise sales training focuses on the sales process, not on what to understand before the process begins.https://murateksi.com/posts/security-posture-as-sales-accelerant/Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/security-posture-as-sales-accelerant/Every enterprise AE has a version of this story. The deal has been running for three months. Commercial terms are agreed. The implementation team has done a discovery session. You are writing the statement of work. Then the customer’s CISO asks to do a security review. Four weeks later, the deal is dead. The review found issues with data residency, or encryption at rest, or the customer’s interpretation of their own regulatory obligations around where compute runs.https://murateksi.com/posts/architecture-review-closes-deals/Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/architecture-review-closes-deals/Somewhere in every serious enterprise cloud deal is a meeting that looks like a technical checkpoint. Someone from the customer’s architecture team asks how the proposed platform handles multi-region failover, or what the data residency story is, or why the migration path doesn’t start with a pilot. The salesperson checks their watch and waits for it to end. That meeting is where the deal is won or lost. What happens in an architecture review The technical reviewers in that room are rarely trying to block the deal.https://murateksi.com/posts/technical-seller-advantage/Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0200https://murateksi.com/posts/technical-seller-advantage/There is a persistent divide in enterprise technology between the people who build and the people who sell. Engineers look at salespeople with suspicion. Salespeople look at engineers as resources to be deployed on calls. Both sides lose, and the customer usually notices. The professionals who create the most value, and build the most durable careers, are the ones who bridge this gap. Not because being a hybrid is fashionable, but because it is structurally harder to replace.https://murateksi.com/posts/selling-cloud-transformation-to-executives/Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0100https://murateksi.com/posts/selling-cloud-transformation-to-executives/Every enterprise executive who has been in their role for more than three years has a cloud horror story. The migration that came in at three times the original budget. The lift-and-shift that lifted costs without shifting any outcomes. The cloud-native rewrite that took two years and still is not done. When you walk into a room to propose a cloud transformation, you are not starting from zero trust. You are starting from negative trust.