The firm — a payroll software company serving customers across East Africa — was at a threshold its founders recognised but had not yet structured for: the difference between selling to several thousand small firms and selling to a small number of large institutions.
We worked with leadership on the structural question first: which of the two motions the firm intended to be at scale, and what each implied for the firm’s sales architecture, compensation, and the founder’s own time.
The engagement produced not a slide deck but a structure — and the recognition, in the senior team, that the institutional motion would have to be designed, not discovered.
How a firm makes its first ten institutional sales is rarely how it makes its next hundred.
What we did
- — Separated the institutional and SME motions into structures that did not borrow from each other.
- — Designed the first version of an enterprise sales function the firm had not previously needed.
- — Built the compensation and territory architecture that the new structure required.
- — Worked with the founder on the conversations the institutional motion would require the founder to lead.
Practice · Management · Marketing