Signature · Field Guide
How enterprise deals
actually close.
The version I wish someone had handed me. Stage by stage, then the case notes — my own deals, sanitized — that earned each opinion. My hand, face up.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Merger year: holding a full enterprise portfolio through the Informa Tech / TechTarget merger
- Situation
- December 2024 — Informa Tech merged with TechTarget mid-cycle while I managed the enterprise portfolio. Mergers are when accounts churn: contacts move, paper gets redone, competitors circle.
- How I ran it
- Re-mapped the threads on both sides of the merger for every account before the ink dried — introductions to new counterparts made personally, and the plan, not just the contract, moved across systems.
- Result
- Zero disruption — every high-value account transitioned without interruption, while I absorbed a new product line. 110% of H1 target; 75% of the annual goal by mid-year.
- What it taught me
- Accounts wired to one contact die in a reorg. Accounts wired wide — on both sides of the table — hold. Stage 02 is not theory to me.
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Territory growth: 38 to 54 accounts in one year, without losing the average
- Situation
- A $3M+ Northwest and California territory across Dark Reading, InformationWeek, Network Computing, and ITPro — clients including Microsoft, AWS, Splunk, Rubrik, Qualys, and Cloudflare.
- How I ran it
- The playbook is the template below: 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.
- 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 it taught me
- New logos come from discovery, not coverage: map the pain to a number, find the person who owns that number, repeat.
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Standing start: opening a new customer segment with no existing book
- Situation
- 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, self-sourced from first conversation to signature.
- How I ran it
- No inherited book means no inherited discovery. Ran every deal end to end myself — sourcing, first meeting, business case, close — 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 it taught me
- Running every deal end to end — sourcing, discovery, close — is the fastest way to make the rest of this guide instinct instead of advice.
Take it · The one-page account plan
The one-pager I run
on every account.
This is the working template behind Stage 02 — the one I fill out before any deal goes on a forecast. Blank on purpose: the method travels, the client data doesn't. Take the file, or print this page — it prints clean.
Account plan — one page, four boxes
- 01 · The number
- The metric this account is paid on, and the named person who owns it. No metric, no deal — a demo.
- 02 · The threads
- Economic buyer · technical owner · champion · the skeptic. A name in every box before commit — "TBD" in any box is the risk register.
- 03 · The calendar
- The customer-side event this deal is dated to — launch, budget lapse, renewal. If nothing breaks for them on a slip, the date is decoration.
- 04 · The kill risk
- The likeliest way this deal dies, written down, with the pre-wire that defuses it — procurement terms agreed before legal sees paper.
Don't take my word for it
House rule: I only publish quotes that are attributed and permissioned — so until clients and managers sign off, their words live on LinkedIn, not here. What I can publish today:
- Event Enabler Award, 2017 — conferred by UBM Tech leadership for sales-operations impact on Black Hat and GDC.
- ExCo Special Recognition Award, 2017 — executive-committee recognition, same year.
- Promoted twice inside the same company — operations to revenue seat (2018), to Sales Manager (2019). Promotions are the review you can't write yourself.
- References on request — email me and I'll connect you with managers and clients directly, plus recommendations on LinkedIn.