You don't growth hack enterprise sales. There's no funnel trick that compresses vendor review and no viral loop that survives a 40+ master agreement. My deals crawl through legal, procurement, compliance, finance & then back to legal again, and anyone who claims they hacked that is either selling you something or has never actually sold to an enterprise.

But you don't sit around waiting for RFPs to fall into your inbox either. So over the years I've quietly built a few engines that do the work while I sleep.

The first took me too long to lean into. Logos open doors that cold emails never will. The day Shell went exclusive with us, every conversation changed. I stopped explaining who we are and started getting asked whether we could do for them what we did for Shell. One real reference is worth more than a thousand cold messages, so now I spend less energy chasing new names.

The second engine is the one most founders are sitting on without realising it. Our own ecosystem is the pipeline. We have thousands of vendors who talk to procurement teams I've never met & the cheapest lead generation on earth is a customer who tells their network because you actually made their life easier.

The third is the post you're reading. Building in Public is top of funnel. The same CFOs/procurement heads I want to reach are on LinkedIn at six in the morning too, and when I share the messy parts honestly, people end up trusting the wins more. Trust is what shortens a sales cycle, and you can't buy it with ad spend.

I'll also be honest about something founders are still shy to admit. We use AI heavily for the unglamorous research that used to eat whole afternoons. Before a meeting with a new account, I want to know their procurement structure, recent tenders, and where their pain probably lives. That used to take an analyst half a day. Now I get a solid first draft in minutes and spend my time on the angle instead of gathering raw material. It doesn't close the deal. It just means I always show up prepared, which in enterprise sales is half the battle.

So if you take anything from this, take these.

Stop optimising your funnel and start optimising your proof. One referenceable client beats any campaign you could run.

Treat your existing customers as a distribution channel, not a closed deal, because the referral revenue is sitting right there waiting for you to ask.

Patience, it turns out, is a strategy and not a weakness. If your cycle is nine months, the win isn't shaving it to eight. It's keeping the top so full that nine months stops hurting.

Still here, still rowing :)

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