24-months to renew the largest digital native customer in ASEAN
Grab is a super app from South-East Asia listed on Nasdaq, the biggest digital native in Singapore and a large IT spender. They have been using our solution for the last 5 years before I joined. As a Strategic Account Executive in 2024 to save the customer from churning. I had 24 months to change the vibe. I spent first 6 months to build trust with operation platform team, the team that own the budgets. In reality it was not many folks willing to talk to me. Only 3 at the beginning. To increase my network, I got into the routine to go to their office on Thursday afternoon (a day where most employees come to the office), every week. I've been consistent with the routine, and went most of the weeks for 24 months. Also I visited 2 satellites office in Thailand and Malaysia, Fortunately I was given a extern card to book room and have access to the slack. Each week I'll ping some new people on slack and slowly built my network. Rapidly, I found that users where mostly open to talk, looking for enablement and training. However the platform team were though to deal with, always bringing open-sources equivalent in the discussion to compete. I had no fixed solutions architect at that time, so every week I need to convince someone internally to tag along and bring a topic, a demo, a cost optimisation trick. Most of the interest from the platform team was to reduce cost, so I follow lean in to show value as their rep. This is when luck ring at my door, and I receive a slack from a team I had never engaged with, it was a cyber security team, that normally don't engage with us, but they were interested in a partner we had. I went all in, brought all of our leaders in the discussion, put the deal in the pipelines, introduce our CISO to their CISO to build relationships, got the right level of support, meet the partner with regular cadence. This went for 3 months, and during that time, given I had the met the CISO, that I considered the economic buyer, I didn't expend the discussion to the CTO. To my surprise, The CTO was the actual executive buyer and still hold grievance about our company and past deal. He shut down the whole project in a few weeks, and my champions were given bad perf review for having done the project.... so we lost the project. This was when I understood the importance of the CTO in this company. What did I do next? Follow in the next episode. Ask your questions !