A factory owner who had stopped noticing a problem sees it measured — by a drone, a sensor or a piece of software — and buys a solution he did not know he needed. That was the corporate business of América Móvil Claro in Ecuador, where I was Regional Commercial Lead: long sales cycles, key accounts and new business built on commercial intelligence.
Connectivity became a commodity years ago: everyone has fibre, everyone competes on price, and the conversation ends at the megabit. The corporate business exists to move past that — to sell things a client cannot buy by comparing two quotes, because they do not yet know how to specify what they need.
That changes the sale completely. A connectivity deal is a procurement transaction. An Industry 4.0 deal is a consulting engagement that happens to end in a contract, and it is won or lost in the diagnosis, not in the price.
What made this role interesting is that each line sells to a different person inside the same company, on a different logic and a different time horizon. Treating them as one catalogue is the fastest way to sell none of them.
Sensors, connected machines and the data layer that turns a plant floor into something measurable. Sold as visibility over an operation, not as hardware.
Buyer: operations or plant management.
Argument: what you cannot measure, you are already paying for.
Aerial inspection, surveying and monitoring for infrastructure, agriculture and large sites — the jobs that today cost a team, a truck and a day.
Buyer: operations, maintenance, agronomy.
Argument: the easiest ROI in the portfolio, because the alternative has a visible cost.
Custom development capacity for companies with a process nobody sells off the shelf. The line that turns a supplier into a partner, because the client's own system ends up living with you.
Buyer: IT leadership and the business owner of the process.
Argument: the longest cycle and the deepest lock-in.
The network the other three run on. Commoditised on its own, decisive as the foundation — and the reason the account exists in the first place.
Buyer: IT and procurement.
Argument: the door, not the destination.
The commercial insight that organises all four: connectivity is the only one the client already knows he needs, and the only one where you compete on price. Every other line is more profitable and less contested — but you rarely get invited to talk about it unless you already hold the network. So the cheap product defends the account and the expensive ones grow it.
Enterprise technology in a mid-sized economy has a specific difficulty: the client agrees with you, and still does not buy. Not because of price — because the purchase has no owner, no budget line and no urgency. The work is manufacturing all three.
Who runs the plant, who signs, who loses if it fails, and who has been quietly complaining about this problem for two years. That last person is the sale.
A demo shows what the product does. A diagnosis shows what the current situation costs — in downtime, in inspection hours, in a process still running on spreadsheets. Only one of the two creates a budget.
Enter through the need the client already recognises, then expand into the lines that carry the margin. An account with four lines is a different asset from four accounts with one.
Analytics on productivity, conversion and team performance — because in a long-cycle business the only thing you can manage weekly is the behaviour that produces the result months later.
Key-account loyalty and new business development need different rhythms and different people. Blending them means the urgent renewal always eats the important prospect.
Deliberately without figures. Claro's commercial numbers are not mine to publish, and a portfolio with invented ones is worth less than a portfolio with none.
New corporate accounts brought into the portfolio, in a market where the same twenty companies are called by every competitor.
Not a single quarter's spike — consistency, which in long-cycle sales is the only honest evidence of a working process.
Retention of key accounts and development of new business held under one lead, with the commercial intelligence to see both.
Technology sold on the client's operational problem rather than on the specification sheet.
A decade of consumer goods teaches you to move millions of people a little. Two years of enterprise B2B teaches you to move one buying committee a lot. The instinct they share is the one I would bring anywhere: find where the value already exists and is not being counted — an unmeasured plant floor, an inspection done the expensive way, a fleet of trucks nobody treats as media.
It is also the reason I can sit in a room with a CTO and with a brand team on the same day. Most marketing leaders can do one of those conversations. The interesting problems increasingly need both.
Key accounts, decision makers and the problem each one has stopped noticing.
Industry 4.0 sold as an operational result, with commercial analytics behind it.
Proof-of-value first, technology second.