From $1M Forecast to $50M Win in 12 months
- Skip Roncal
- Jan 12
- 4 min read
How We Out-Platformed the Incumbent and Reframed the Deal
When this opportunity first appeared, it looked like a focused replacement of a product configuration engine. Our account executive was a consistent top performer and had forecast the deal for $1M in the first quarter. The incumbent configuration vendor was already in place and positioned its next release as the most economical path to efficiency. We were framed as a horizontal CRM vendor with limited industry references at the required scale. That framing shaped how we engaged.
I was the sales engineering leader for a multi-vertical business enterprise software company in the Bay Area. The account team was located outside Milwaukee, and the buyer was a $9B revenue, large medical-device manufacturer of CT/MRI systems. Their core pain centered on configuring complex imaging units across acquisition, delivery, and service, and keeping those assets available with minimal disruption. In that environment, upstream planning and downstream logistics were tightly coupled with the configuration process. Small changes to a multi-system process or changes to a single data element in their enterprise architecture could create high internal costs. The status quo was not cost-neutral.
The customer’s RFI focused on replacing the configuration engine and assumed all integration methods and patterns to the mid- and back-office systems were set, and only needed to be verified. Our presales objective was to examine the edges and handoffs of these processes: where configuration intersected with call intake, field service scheduling, parts availability, billing throughput, and customer experience. Following those threads broadened the stakeholder set and our opportunity. As the configuration team validated assumptions with adjacent owners, additional pain points surfaced along with clearer objectives and constraints, and more importantly, the value of a holistic solution approach.
We continued to demonstrate configuration capabilities, but always within the broader system: call volumes in the thousands per day, field service efficiency (including offline synchronization - think hospital subfloors), parts and supplies logistics to prevent repeat truck rolls, and billing performance that needed to meet defined throughput targets. Our goal was not to dilute the configuration problem; it was to reframe the system interdependencies as more than just integration points but opportunities to optimize and innovate to ensure installed-base uptime, service reliability, and customer experience.
To meet the expectations, we facilitated a 30+60-day proof of concept. The team spent 30 days outside Milwaukee addressing the application's functional requirements, and then I led a second team of experts at our HQ to address the technical deployment requirements for a global implementation. This included standing up a proxy billing system to address their billing throughput benchmarks. It's critical to point out that, without our success in the first 30 days of the POC, we would not have garnered the executive sponsorship to engage our professional services experts, engineering, and product management to support closing out the 60-day POC sprint, which sealed the technical win.
By the end of Q3, the scope was clear to senior leadership. The original replacement still mattered, but the greater risk and value lay in how configuration flowed through service, logistics, and billing to protect installed-base uptime. At the end of Q4, we closed $50M (after a considerable % discount). In Q1 of the following year, I kicked off the transition to delivery: onboarding our services organization, packaging all the presales artifacts (configurations, test data, benchmark results, interface definitions, and decision logs), to ensure the engagement began with a shared understanding of objectives, constraints, and acceptance criteria.
Two elements strengthened our position during evaluation: scale and global reach. The solution needed to support 10,000 field service agents and 1,250 call center agents, while also serving 1,500 business analysts, 500 partners, and 100 hospital customers. The user base spanned 10 languages: English, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, French, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, and Flemish, which drove decisions on localization, double-byte handling, translation workflows, and environment strategy. On the delivery side, resources included 60 members on our implementation team, 61 on the customer’s team, and a comparable number of offshore resources, requiring clear governance, release management, and evidence capture so each handoff remained unambiguous.
Three behaviors that made the difference:
Beginner's mindset to see the whole problem and surface edge cases.
Empathy to probe each team’s pain and record trade-offs.
Consistent communication to ensure executive alignment and follow sponsored priorities.
What began as a point-tool evaluation became a platform decision as we shifted from features to system outcomes. We matched the incumbent on configuration and demonstrated how an integrated stack that included a call center, field service with offline sync, parts logistics, and billing throughput better met their objectives and lowered their risk, enabling a technical decision that supported the commercial one and a delivery start grounded in evidence.
Next up: our $100M win with a nation's leading telecommunication company. Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Skip Roncal
Founder
This account is from my perspective as the presales leader, responsible for driving and coordinating all presales activities associated with this opportunity. Most opportunities of this size require a team effort across presales, product management, and expert services to win. The details reflect my recollection based on data, and the revenue figure and % an approximate.
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