In 2018, Matt Barron landed his dream role in enterprise sales at a top-5 Microsoft partner. Three weeks later, his only sales counterpart quit and the office P&L landed on a brand-new seller with no IT consulting background.
Cold calls flopped. Cold emails died in spam. Traditional outbound was not enough, so he made Microsoft the first client before there were clients to win. That meant hunting down partner managers, learning ECIF funding, building cadence with Azure sellers, and treating AEs, SSPs, and ATSs like the buying committee.
Within two years, Microsoft reps were creating pipeline for him. Nine years and $70M later, that motion became a repeatable operating system Matt still runs today as VP of Revenue & Growth at Echelix.