In 2018 I landed what felt like my dream role in enterprise sales at a top-5 Microsoft partner. Three weeks later, my only sales counterpart quit and the office P&L landed on me, a brand-new seller with no IT consulting background.
Cold calls flopped. Cold emails died in spam. So I stopped treating Microsoft like a logo on a slide and started treating Microsoft like the first client I had to win. That meant finding partner managers, learning ECIF, building cadence with Azure sellers, and figuring out what actually got reps to care.
Within 2 years Microsoft reps were creating pipeline for me. 9 years and $70M later, that motion is still the core of how I think about this work. I run it today as VP of Revenue & Growth at Echelix, and I use the same operating system with clients here.