My biggest 'aha moment' came when I was wearing both hats--broker and property manager. I'd see attorneys negotiate these complex common area maintenance clauses, then watch clerks struggle to actually implement them. The breakthrough? I realized tenants and landlords were burning money on legal fees for agreements that couldn't work in practice. I took this to our team at Trout by showing them real numbers from one of our developments with Target. We'd spent thousands on attorneys negotiating a reciprocal easement agreement, only to have Target's operations person tell me "We have 775 stores. We don't do it differently for you." If someone had said that upfront, we could have saved our client serious money. Now when our brokerage team negotiates leases, I pull in someone from our management side early. We literally walk through how the lease will be administered before the ink dries. This catches the stuff that looks great on paper but creates billing nightmares or maintenance disputes six months later. The coordinated effort came from me being a CPA who does forensic accounting and property management--I've seen where deals fall apart in execution. Our agents now know to ask "How will this actually work on day 92 of the lease?" not just "Does this sound fair?"
After all, finding concrete evidence of a strategic shift in an annual report is an incredibly freeing discovery. That little-known fact allows a generic pitch to become personalized. It signals to your team that the client's big picture is important. The efficient thing to do is share this discovery quickly with the rest of the organization. Managers and designers collaborate to put together a coherent message. This exclusive knowledge is reflected in each outreach effort. It's this sort of collaboration which turns a small discovery into forming a large contract. This replaces a game of luck with a repeatable, synchronized approach to win big enterprise accounts.
My most significant moment of understanding occurred because I discovered that an enterprise retailer we targeted actually based its business decisions on its brand narrative about creative and sustainable lifestyles. Their most successful campaigns demonstrated their best performance through slow living and craftsmanship and screen-free experiences which matched ROKR's fundamental identity according to my research which extended beyond standard procurement data. The insight transformed my approach to value proposition development because it redirected our discussion from product-based talks to cultural experience discussions. I returned to my team with this viewpoint and collaborated with product and design and content marketing teams to create a single story which showcased our unique wooden craftsmanship and our deep connection to everyday life.
All of that was about to change after the CEO appeared on an unknown podcast. He said there's a particular problem with data being fragmented. That detail did not appear in their official reports. It was a trove of buried treasure of information. Below is a clip I sent to our entire sales team. And our marketing team crafted a custom pitch. We pitched the whole story based on taking down that road block. The client felt truly understood. The strategic fit turned a cold lead into a big partner. Precise research wins substantial deals.
A search on a client uncovered an unexpected finding. I came across the CTO's senior thesis from college. It had a narrow coding approach. This tiny detail had just revealed why they were behind on technology. They did not desire a new product. They did not want to replace their current system. I told this to my team. Marketing built new case studies around that framework. Advertisement Sales altered their tactics for the next delegate. We stopped selling features and began to solve their problem. It was a co-ordinated push that moved a cold lead into a signed contract.
Studying one of the world's largest tech companies exposed a hidden focus. I found a public interview with their chief architect. He also railed at the "unbearably high data delay" of edge computing. We never even mentioned this in our standard pitch. It was a massive oversight. I mentioned this discovery during our morning sync up. Our engineers came up with a customized performance report in no time. I made a special presentation about edge security for marketing. Sales also adjusted their opening line to identify latency issues. It was this detail that made our message come together as one. We landed the account because we listened better than anyone else.
My biggest "aha moment" came as we recognized a certain set of home-buyers being completely overlooked by large banks - people who had the money but couldn't get to it fast enough to win a bidding war. We saw clients losing out on their dream home exactly because their funds were tied up in their current property or other investments. They were sound financially but "illiquid" on paper at the crucial time. The breakthrough came when I began looking at it not as a lending problem, but a timing problem. I realized that we could use our own capital to make cash offers on their behalf. To make this a team effort, I sat down with our loan officers and our legal team. We stripped away the red tape. We built a "Cash Offer" program where we basically acted as our client's buyer. The team was forced to change the way they think from those of traditional processors to those of investors. It worked. We helped clients to win homes that they would have otherwise lost, and it completely differentiated us when it came to a crowded market. Sometimes the largest opportunities are lurking in the friction everyone else ignores.
My most valuable lesson came when an enterprise target was blocked due to a fear of internal friction. They were telling me, on the surface, that they had a technical issue. I had to look at job postings, support tickets, and interviews with the leadership. There was friction, and there were real gaps in the product and in the operations. Each of the teams was sidestepping accountability and blaming the others for the slow decision-making. I pitched it differently. Instead of looking at it in terms of product features, I wrapped our product in a layer of partnership that would, in effect, ease the friction. I had a brief with the team that went, "We're not solving their technical problem. We're solving their people problem." Everything changed. The sales discovery questions changed. The technical discussions focused more on the partnership. We went from silence to a multi-team demo and were amazed that product, ops, and IT were all in the same room.
The greatest revelation made consisted of understanding that the actual decision maker was not the grants or finance team but the compliance group. Study of audit reports and board books indicated that there were recurrent worries regarding claw backs, reporting mistakes and regulatory risks. The observation transformed the whole narrative. The discovery was reported at ERI Grants accompanied with evidence to enable it to facilitate action. The questions regarding intake were transformed to reveal compliance risks at an early stage. The focus on messaging moved to less funding size, and more to fewer audit findings and fewer cleaner reporting. To facilitate the promise, delivery teams harmonized documentation standards. One of the insights that were taken as a common operating assumption allowed the team to pull together and generate the account within the shortest time possible.
The greatest discovery was the identification of the enterprise buyer as risk-averse and not growth-oriented. The first studies were on expansion and budget augmentation which was a positive indicator. Further analysis through audit language, board updates and compliance disclosures showed that the same concern revolved around penalties, reporting mistakes and reputational exposure. That changed the discussion completely. It was necessary to transform that insight into the action of the team, not personal. The discovery was captured with example sources and applied towards repositioning messages, inquiry questions, and priority in delivery. Sales re-packaged discussions on exposure reduction. The focus of operations was on documentation discipline and audit readiness. They all operated on the same set of knowledge concerning what was really important to the buyer. At ERI Grants, such an alignment minimized the duration of sales cycles and eased friction. The reason why the account proceeded was that the team worked on the root cause of the fear rather than the surface opportunity.
I was able to find that a target CEO had many posts about a particular niche hobby on LinkedIn. This leader loved vertical urban farming. I knew we could leverage our software to optimize the data for his personal project. This revelation propelled us past cold business pitches. It felt like a warm, human connection. I communicated this result to our sales and marketing crews. We had a cormoration-themed custom pedagogical presentation. Our engineer even built a quick demo based around those exact metrics. This was a gestalt effort born from love of his interests. We got a meeting in less than a week.
One such shock came when it was realized that a target company publicly announced a good increase in revenues, but secretly stagnated recruitment in one of its divisions. The first sight impression of the account was healthy and hard to penetrate. The indication of that opposition implied a different point of stress. Cost control was protecting growth, which is generally a symptom of internal examination concerning efficiency and costing of vendors instead of expansion as its own goal. That observation altered the modus operandi. Rather than setting up around innovation or scale, the discussion was about cutting drag in the operations within that particular division. The study went internal and was not conveyed in the form of a slide deck but rather a short brief. It described the freeze of the hiring process, the affected teams, and where the gaps were already being occupied by external partners. Outreach was made to each function so as to be in line with that reality. The re-packaged messaging, speedy onboarding routes, and management endorsed a pilot framework embraced a definitive cost cap. The momentum came along due to the fact that the outreach sounded informed instead of aspirational. The narrative acknowledged that the team was aware of limitations within the organization even prior to the group meeting. Converting an individual observation into a common situation enabled everybody to pull in the same direction and this brought credibility early and hastened consensus in the buyer side.
The realization that those who were not in the room was the breaking through point. Buried in newspaper publications and employment opportunities, there was a trend. Decision making had been centralized quietly in the account following a messaging rollout failure, although most outgoing messages were directed to department heads. That incompatibility described gagged conversations. Power lay in a small operational committee affiliated with the risk and procurement, not the champions they all were flaunting. To make that insight into a reality, it took concentration. The crew came to one story twist and discarded parallel angles that ceased to be applicable. Research was posted in a concise gist that identified the actual course of decision, stated current limitations and charted out arguments that would tend to appear. Adjusted outreach through sales, marketing restored one of the assets to help in dealing with risk exposure, and leadership engaged in only the necessary conversations. It was followed by momentum in few weeks. The sales meetings were successful because the message was consistent with the reality of the buyer. The lesson stuck. Enterprise advances in a direction where inquiry is bold and the teams agree on a single point of view rather than a multitude of well-meaning people.
The greatest surprise was the discovery that there was no buying barrier that was related to the price, breadth of the product or the terms of the contract. Purchase records and government filings indicated that the account was punished by the company due to fulfillment mistakes rather than spending. One late or wrong shipment was enough to cause internal audits to halt renewals. That changed the whole way of doing things. The discussion shifted out of cost savings and focused on operational risk reduction. The revelation emerged through one of the regular audits of supplier performance reports, which were appended to a disclosure of compliance to the public. Close monitoring was done on error rates rather than spend variance. After that, the group became coordinated. Redesigned outreach Sales based on guarantees. Operations ready information about past pick accuracy and error resolving schedule. The pilot proposal constituted by account management prioritized limited SKUs with stringent service-level reporting. In the case of MacPherson Medical Supply, the breakthrough occurred due to one fact that altered the story. The early dissemination of such an insight enabled all functions to work toward the same goal. Alignment orchestrating an enterprise target into a closed account by solving the problem that the buyer was actually evaluated on.
The biggest revelation for me was that the only thing that matters is WHO you reach out to. Even if you have the perfect product that can immediately solve the target's pain point, and if you reached out at the right time, you still won't get a meeting if you contact the wrong person. And it's not just the idea of targeting the right account (e.g. head of sales for an ad tracking product), but rather the person who is easy to reach. Check out for signals such as strong online presence, and activity across socials. A person that is generally online and cares about showing up is your best bet. Even if it's not in the same department, they can connect you to the right person.
Hi Influ2 team! I am Shaun Bettman, CEO and Chief Mortgage Broker of Eden Emerald Mortgages, with over 20 years in the mortgage industry, and a corporate finance background as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG. I've been on Channel 9's Today Show and write regularly for Domain and realestate.com.au on residential and commercial finance with 70+ lender networks. My responses are: I was researching a mid-sized property development firm in Sydney that we'd been trying to work with for six months. I was getting nowhere through the normal channels. Then their CFO left a comment on a LinkedIn post I'd written regarding SMSF property strategies, saying he was reviewing their entire self-managed super fund structure due to recent regulatory changes. That one-off comment changed everything. So I then researched their company's structure and found out that four of their five senior executives have commercial property holdings in their individual SMSFs. All of these structures were set up during 2018 and 2019 when the tax treatment was different. However, the regulatory landscape had changed, and none of the executives had updated their financing arrangements to keep up. They are currently paying nearly $180,000 annually in unnecessary taxes and interest charges across the entire senior management team. So here's how I turned that into a coordinated effort. I brought our tax specialist and our commercial finance analyst together and we did a full restructure proposal that dealt with all five executives simultaneously rather than having to pitch them individually. Our proposal showed the exact amount that each executive would be able to save by refinancing their individual SMSF loans through a combined structure and the timing was related to their looming fund audits in March. The way in which we approached the opportunity collectively as a group won us the entire account because we viewed their senior management team as a collective unit, rather than five separate opportunities. The insight was not simply related to identifying a single member's needs, it was about recognizing a systemic problem affecting the entire C-Suite of their organization. Cheers, Shaun
I was stuck on a client's system problems. Their sales software and customer database couldn't talk to each other. So I stuck our engineers and business analysts in a room, and we figured out how to connect everything. It took some time to get right, but now that's how we handle these client integrations. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to my personal email at eberlyjc1@gmail.com :)
I was talking with a language center and realized their real problem was payroll. They were calculating tutor hours by hand, which meant errors every week. Teachers got paid wrong and the admin staff spent all weekend fixing it. Our automated payroll feature had a rough start at first, but my team jumped in right away. We worked directly with their staff to rebuild the process. Now the mistakes are gone and teachers get paid correctly and on time.
While researching a teen health program, I noticed the kids were lonely. They had no peer support. So I got the team together and we created group therapy workshops. It was tricky at first, but then the kids started talking to each other, really talking. Their feedback was completely different, and suddenly we knew we had done something right.
I always figured those niche search terms were basically worthless, but it turned out our biggest enterprise client was getting their best leads from them while their competitors weren't even looking. The traffic from these terms converted at a higher rate. Once I showed the team this, we threw out the old plan and built a new content strategy around those keywords, which ended up working much better than our original outreach.