Three years. One corporation. One SAP lobby. And me, alone against it.
In 2010, I closed the largest single project in the history of a mid-sized software company where I worked as Sales Manager. Project volume: roughly €800,000. Customer: a division of an international steel group.
Up to this point, this sounds like a normal success story. What the numbers don’t show: getting there took three years — and for most of that time, the entire corporate IT department was on the other side.
The task was clear. The opponent was internal.
Our product was a tool for integrated business planning — covering everything from raw material procurement through production to sales planning, all in one system. For this division, it was the right solution from a functional standpoint. That was never the question.
The question was: SAP, or us.
The group had an SAP lobby — employees and departments who pushed every software decision toward SAP-internal solutions, regardless of whether it was actually the right functional fit. And corporate IT had a legitimate strategic concern: what happens to the group-wide IT strategy if a single division introduces a system from a mid-sized vendor that’s not part of the SAP landscape?
At the time, I was solely responsible for this account. No sales team behind me, no headquarters negotiating on my behalf. A single vendor, up against the IT strategy of an international group.
Three years of relationship building, no deal in sight
What do you do in this situation? You don’t sell faster. You build relationships.
Over three years, I systematically maintained contact with the entire buying center — not just the obvious decision-makers, but everyone who had or could have any influence on the decision. That meant a lot of conversations with no immediate output. A lot of meetings where, at the end, nothing “happened” except that a relationship became a little more solid.
The point wasn’t to apply pressure. The point was that people within the buying center became internal advocates — people willing to put their own weight behind our solution against the SAP lobby and corporate IT, when the moment came.
This is a different kind of sales work than most enterprise deals. There’s no pipeline stage for it. There’s no CRM field for “built trust over three years.” But without it, the deal would never have had a chance.
What mattered in the end
After winning the deal, my work wasn’t done. I led the steering committee all the way through to successful project acceptance — fully accountable, from the first contact to the final meeting.
One detail from the implementation says more about the project than any relationship story: the effort we had jointly planned with the customer and the consulting partner — we hit it, in the end, within half a person-day.
For a project of this scale — three years of lead time, multiple departments, a complex planning system spanning raw material procurement, production, and sales — that’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of the same care that carried the sales process: looking closely, never blindsiding anyone, and delivering exactly what was promised.
Holding your ground as a lone vendor against an entrenched SAP lobby was structurally anything but easy. Three years to close the deal, and then a near-perfect landing on effort. Together, that’s the real story.
Martin Lehofer is a marketing and growth leader with 15+ years of B2B experience in enterprise environments. He develops GTM strategies, brands, and teams — with a focus on Cloud, AI, and Data in the DACH market.