Grab is a super app from South-East Asia listed on Nasdaq, the biggest digital-native company in Singapore and a major IT spender. They had been using our solution for five years before I joined as a Strategic Account Executive in 2024, with the mission to turn the account around. The account was worth approximately $2.5M…
By the time I found out, we were already three calls deep into what our champion called a "standard compliance review." It wasn’t. Procurement had been instructed to find leverage — any leverage — to drop the ACV by thirty percent or kill the deal entirely.
Here’s what I did wrong in those first two weeks, and what I’d do differently now that I’ve lived it once.
The signals I missed
Looking back at the call recordings, three things were already shifting in the weeks before. First, my champion’s tone on procurement calls got careful — too careful. Second, meeting acceptance rates from finance dropped from a hundred percent to forty in the span of ten days. I wrote it off as end-of-quarter busyness. It wasn’t.
Third — and this is the one that stings most — the economic buyer stopped including me on email threads. Not explicitly. Just gradually. The threads got shorter. My name moved to BCC. Then disappeared entirely.