I spent 5 years in enterprise sales at ServiceNow. Most recently on the Volkswagen Group account. And here is the uncomfortable truth: I could not keep track of what was happening in my own accounts.
Not because I was lazy. Because no human can.
This essay is about why that is — and why I quit my job to fix it.
Growth never stops
Every company I have seen, pre- or post-product-market-fit, has the same hunger: growth. Sales teams have to make it happen. That part never changes.
What changes is how companies sell — and that depends on their stage.
How companies sell today
Startups begin with founder-led sales. Once they gain traction, they hire a GTM team. The team builds hypotheses around an ICP — usually persona + industry + company size. You end up with something like "manufacturing companies in Germany, >100 employees."
That ICP gives you roughly 50,000 possible accounts in Germany alone. Finding the right ones becomes the core job of every sales rep. I can tell you from my own past: it is a tedious one.
And the clock is running. If you don't crack this within 12 months:
- You lose traction.
- Your investors get nervous. Funding gets harder.
- You can't attract top talent.
- Leadership nervousness eats your culture from the inside.
Enterprise teams face the opposite problem. They have the accounts — they can't see inside them. Take Siemens. As a Client Director, you cover Siemens globally: 6 large entities (Healthineers, Energy, ...) across 140 markets. Each of those 6 entities has more than 50 subsidiaries.
That is ~300 entities for one person. You are supposed to know about every major change in all of them. No human is built for that.
On top of that, every Client Director faces a daily dilemma: existing contacts and partners fill your calendar. New business has to come from somewhere — existing connections, partners, or net new leads. I have seen it in my own calendar: if you don't force yourself to meet new people, you meet the same connections over and over. The pipeline opportunity stays on the table.
Commercial sellers are different again. Typically ~10 existing accounts plus a territory of 100+ prospects. That means researching 110+ accounts and matching them to your portfolio. A sales manager with 8 reps is looking at 500–600 accounts — not counting "Territory 99," the unassigned accounts anyone can hunt in.
Same problem at every stage: too many accounts, too little visibility.
Your extended team is idle
Companies have well-connected executives. In theory, you can use them for warm intros. In practice: when exactly do you ask your CRO to reach out to a prospect — without a specific reason, a specific trigger, a specific ask?
Same with marketing. Same with trade fairs. Which fair do you attend? And once you are there — what is your opening line?
Without a concrete signal, your extended team stays idle. Not because they don't want to help. Because nobody can tell them when and why.
2,000+ tools, and the problem is still unsolved
There are an estimated 2,000+ sales tools on the market. Likely many more. Funny thing: the problem still exists. Most tools cover exactly one slice:
- Email sequences.
- LinkedIn sequences.
- Pre-set templates that know nothing about the lead and barely anything about the company.
- Territory news feeds — that miss the CIO on a podcast, the CEO on stage, the CISO publicly naming a pain point you could pitch against. And when they do catch it, the information sits in a silo.
- Lead extraction tools that produce a list — if you are tech-savvy enough to operate them.
The result is simple. Most account executives don't do consistent outreach anymore. A motivated few sit down, research the latest news with Claude or ChatGPT, draft an email, hit send. Once. Then the calendar wins again — customer meetings, partner calls, internal to-dos. The Sales Navigator credits stay untouched.
Bill McDermott put it bluntly on the Acquired podcast: "Sales is a numbers game." A numbers game means weekly, disciplined outreach. Almost nobody sustains that manually. And companies lose millions in new revenue because of it.
Information asymmetry
Try drafting a great email to a new business unit. I noticed: it is hard. You need a reason. A good opener for why now.
Experienced teams solve this with hypothesis-based selling. The hypotheses live in account plans:
- Challenges of the customer
- Opportunities with the customer
- Impact of our product, defined in KPIs
Each plan is written once a year — in December, ready by mid-January. Updated once in summer. Meanwhile, enterprise budgets run on biannual cycles: the 2026 budget was defined in 2024. So your plan for this year is really a plan for next year. Sales cycles stretch accordingly.
Except when they don't. If a crucial event hits your territory — say, your customer suffers a cyber attack and you sell a solution that helps — special budget appears overnight. You have to reach out immediately. Or you upsell inside a running renewal. Either way: the rep who sees the signal first wins.
That signal is the missing piece. After 5 years in enterprise sales, that was my conclusion: salespeople don't lack effort. They lack the intelligence layer — and the tools to act on it the same day.
So I built it
SalesXMachina is one application for the German-speaking market — Germany, Austria, Switzerland — that closes the loop:
- Scanning German, Austrian and Swiss news sources daily
- Matching your product with concrete buying opportunities
- Extracting the right stakeholders
- Ranking them
- Email & LinkedIn outreach
- Follow-ups
Hosted in the EU. Built in Germany. Run with care from Munich.
We are live with our first paying customers in the German market, and we are just getting started. If your team is sitting on a territory it can't fully see — talk to us. The signals are already out there. Someone will act on them.
Happy selling Axel