A Beginner's Mindset - A $40 million lesson

Beginner’s Mindset — A $40 Million Lesson

Imagine getting an RFI for supply-chain software from your new boss (the one who didn’t want to hire you) and shipping back a CRM proposal. It happened.

I’d just completed a week-long onboarding exercise that found me sitting in a conference room (solo), reading our GTM architecture reference guide. Seriously, for one week, I read it cover to cover. At the time, we had an early customer in the CPG industry, a charter customer, who, along with Andersen Consulting (look it up), collaborated to bring to market our CPG Trade Promotions Management solution. The GTM reference book, compiled by our team of Ivy League MBAs and product managers, was the best enterprise software 'enablement' in my career. Dense and informative, a book that I referenced often for the first year.

Back to the supply-chain RFI, which was clearly written for SAP but shared with us because our company and the prospect share a board member. I’ll spare you the names, but he was a Nobel Prize–winning economist. Never underestimate the value of a great board.

The RFI focused on the middle and back-office processes of launching and fulfilling promotions, the shipment of products to fulfill those promotional orders, and the inventory to support seasonal promotions for textile, apparel, and footwear products. It was thick with details about processes, systems, and data interdependencies. My software sales experience up to that point was at a CASE/database design tool company. I had no background with packaged enterprise applications, and certainly none with SAP. What I did have was a newly acquired knowledge set about CPG “systems” and the trade-promotion management process for consumer packaged goods via distributors. With this, I extrapolated and adjusted the logical workflows for consumer products (CP), which rely on similar retail distribution but with different promotional processes called 'assortments' and the highly specialized data requirements for Textiles, Apparel, and Footwear product sales.

After reading the RFI at least twice just to understand the words, I found every instance of “promotion,” asked for clarification, and added to our response, “If what you mean is…”, then inserted a positive storyline about synchronizing the middle and back office with what we would later call CRM. I included hypothetical ROI metrics based on the optimal implementation of our solution in support of their SAP. I reviewed, edited, and collaborated with my manager to ensure the response met our strict guidelines, and we submitted it.

I don’t recall exactly how long it took to hear back, but the reply (paraphrased) was: “We’ve read your creative response and would like you to come up and explain it.” They gave the sales rep dates and times. I was stunned and nervous. I’d been at the company less than 90 days; this was my first technical lead role, and it was my first Silicon Valley company, pre-hoodies. We wore suits every day. I felt like an impostor, but I knew I was surrounded by the brightest in enterprise applications and that sales could secure any resources, as long as the opportunity was qualified. I took a breath and started diagramming how to support our RFI response. I networked and mapped internal stakeholders to support our journey, including our executive leadership team.

In the end, I led the technical demo design, documentation, and presentations, supported by many folks (some mentioned at the end). The opportunity took about 14 months to close and was valued at roughly $40 million—about 10% of our annual revenue. The sales rep loved me. The executive team promoted me. Product management backed us and eventually built a new SKU that still shows up in Oracle’s portfolio documentation.

So what did we do?We zoomed out and inserted our emerging CRM application at the seam of their business challenge. We reframed the problem, and, in turn, the value and the budget they were willing to allocate to achieve their ROI.

Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Redefine the Battlefield" Don’t answer the test; rewrite it". Position your value where the customer’s org chart has fault lines. This strategy expanded our stakeholder base and elevated the conversation.

Lesson 2: Stay in Beta—even in Month 14 Our 14-month crawl felt like Groundhog Day: new stakeholders, new objections, endless what-ifs. Instead of demo fatigue, we treated each round as user testing. Iterate, document, improve. Beginners iterate; experts get rigid. We were eventually granted passes to the company store, bonus!

Lesson 3: Borrow Credibility—Strategically A Nobel laureate sat on both boards. We didn’t abuse the relationship; we secured one pivotal call that brought together all decision makers for our final demo day. This executive alignment was earned by the team, as we maintained our communication throughout the opportunity and earned trust.

Lesson 4: Co-Create the Future SKU Our thorough and persistent discovery, supported and documented through demos and professional deliverables, surfaced an adjacent pain: the lack of proper CRM with product configuration capabilities for assortment planning. We pulled senior leadership from product, legal, sales, and finance, documented the business case and product scope, and secured a Fortune 100 charter customer to build a new SKU.

Result: $40 million booked, a new product line, and the start of a multi-decade relationship with leaders at a Fortune 100 company. I later led several other deals, but for a different software company. This was the watershed moment for my enterprise software presales career.

Next up: our $90M win with a market-leading Fortune 100 medical-device company. Stay tuned.

Cheers,

Skip Roncal Founder Mobeliz

This account is from my perspective as the lead presales architect, responsible for driving and coordinating all presales activities. It was a team effort, with Gary Prince, David Wipper, Ken Parent, Pete Graham, and Paul Rosenblum supporting sales colleague Ed Butler. The details reflect my recollection, and the revenue figure and % an approximate.