Enterprise Redesign
Rebuilding a Model That No Longer Matched the Buyer
Redesigning how a ~$500M enterprise business sold, when growth was hiding a model built for the wrong market.
The Situation
The numbers looked healthy. Revenue was growing across a large enterprise sales team, and quarterly performance held. But margins were quietly slipping, and it read like a sales performance problem — sell harder, close better, tighten the funnel. It wasn't. Customers had stopped wanting one-off deals and now wanted an ongoing service relationship, while the business was still built to close a deal and move on.
What Had Actually Changed
Everyone read the slipping margin as an effort problem, or a portfolio problem. It was neither. Two structures were quietly holding the old model in place. No one owned the customer once the deal closed — support was reactive, services came late, expansion fell between teams. And the business still rewarded the next deal this quarter, so whatever the strategy asked for, people did what they were rewarded to do.
Those two structures — who owns the customer, and what the business rewards — were fighting the transition, and until both changed, nothing else would hold.The Rebuild
A model change isn't won with more effort or a better message. It's won by changing the few structures that decide how people behave — and changing them together, because fixing one and leaving the other just lets the untouched one pull everyone back. So I rebuilt the two doing the damage as one move: ownership of the customer after the sale was made real, and the rewards behind it were rebuilt to pull toward the lasting relationship, not the close.
The harder judgment was what to leave alone. The business was split in two — strategic accounts run on a lasting relationship, transactional accounts kept fast. I kept the transactional engine exactly as it was, on purpose: converting it would have broken the very thing still funding the change. Knowing which part to transform and which to protect was the whole call.
The Outcome
Managed services grew from about 15% of enterprise contribution to over 40% within roughly eighteen months. Just as important, the transactional engine kept running — the change didn't cost the business the revenue paying for it. Engagement steadied once ownership and rewards finally pointed the same way, and the revenue that grew was more durable than the revenue it replaced.
The Judgment
A new model doesn't run on a better message. It runs on structure — who owns the customer after the sale, and what the business rewards. Change those together, and protect the part still funding the change.
Kept short on purpose. The longer version holds the harder part — the tensions, the trade-offs, and what fought back. Where it maps to something you're facing, I'll share the full account or walk you through it.