Enterprise Software Sales: Largest Deals from a Dormant Pipeline, in Five Months
Trisotech, a Canadian enterprise software company in BPMN and decision modeling. Two consecutive bEffective operator engagements, October 2019 to October 2020.
Engagement 1
Engagement 2
company history
Strong product, real market, no repeatable revenue motion
Trisotech is a Canadian enterprise software company. Their platform serves complex decision modelling and business process management at scale, the kind of system Fortune 500s and large public-sector organizations buy when their existing process tooling has hit a ceiling. Strong product. Real market. The challenge was repeatable revenue conversion, not capability.
A pipeline that looked empty was actually dormant
Two consecutive engagements, two related problems. The first looked like an inbound conversion problem. The second turned out to be hidden in plain sight in the existing prospect database.
If your existing prospect database has buyers who showed up twice and never came back, is the answer to chase more new prospects, or to figure out why the ones you already have stopped engaging? Usually the second, because the answer to the first is buried in the answer to the second.
Two engagements, same discipline
Two consecutive engagements across 13 months. Same discipline applied to two related problems, first an inbound conversion gap, then a dormant pipeline that nobody had recognized. Define the customer, structure the motion, execute the cadence.
Inbound customer and structured pipeline (Blueprint + Build)
- Defined the right customer from the marketing-generated inbound stream.
- Mapped the inbound sales motion into a structured pipeline.
- Built an outbound prospecting strategy with targeted messaging by segment.
- Result in 8 months: 27 new business opportunities, 11 deals closed, over $1M in recurring annual revenue.
Dormant customer recovery (Blueprint, kept simple)
- Analyzed three months of existing prospect data.
- Identified the dormant pattern: a qualified customer segment that had engaged twice with demos and never followed up.
- The data surfaced the opportunity. The strategy defined how to re-engage it.
Build at speed, in-person, on a weekly cadence
- Targeted healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing decision-makers from the existing database.
- Executed 3 to 4 weekly in-person presentations on a sustained cadence.
- Closed mid-six-figure transactions over a 3 to 4 month sales cycle, including a Fortune 500 military shipbuilder and a publicly funded health-services provider.
- Each deal generated $350K to $500K+ in annual subscription revenue.
Largest deals in company history, in five months
recurring revenue in 8 months
per deal, including Fortune 500 anchor
company history closed
Engagement 1 fixed an inbound conversion problem with a defined customer and a structured pipeline: 27 opportunities, 11 deals, $1M+ recurring annual revenue in eight months. Engagement 2 mined the existing prospect database for a dormant customer pattern, and produced the largest deals in Trisotech’s history in five months, anchored by a Fortune 500 military shipbuilder. Two engagements, same discipline: define the customer, structure the motion, execute the cadence. The question is rarely whether the prospects exist. The question is whether the system to convert them does.
On building the systems that close the leaks
“Mike is an experienced and skilled operator. He works diligently at identifying the right personas in the target market to ensure his success. He is focused, strategic, and brings to bear many years of experience to fix our revenue leaks in demand, conversion, and sales areas.”
“Studious, he works to understand our Ideal Customer Profile’s pains and how to approach, engage and close with the potential customer. He creates the systems for addressing the needs of the client with the intent to meet or if possible exceed their expectations. I recommend Mike as your Revenue Operator.”
Three readers see this case differently. Here is how each one should read it.
If your CRM has more historical prospects than your sales team can name, and most B2B businesses do by year three, Trisotech is the case to read. Each lens below answers a different question on the same data.
“Are my largest deals already in my CRM?”
Trisotech’s largest deals in company history were not new prospects. They were buyers who had already shown up twice, including for product demos, and then stopped following up. The fix was not more leads. It was a Blueprint that surfaced the dormant pattern, and a Build that re-engaged the right buyers with a structured weekly cadence. Most companies running an outbound motion at all are running it against people who have never heard of them. The dormant pipeline inside the existing database is usually larger and warmer.
“What is the cost of not recognizing the buyers we already have?”
Engagement 1 produced $1M+ in recurring annual revenue in 8 months. Engagement 2 produced the largest deals in company history, $350K to $500K+ each in annual subscription, in 5 months. Both came from prospects who already existed in the CRM. The CFO line: the cost of acquiring those buyers a second time was nearly zero. The cost of not recognizing them was the entire revenue stream they represented. A CFO should know what the dormant pipeline inside the existing CRM is worth, every quarter it sits unworked is a quarter of revenue forfeited.
“Is this asset’s growth a system or a story?”
For a PE-considered SaaS or enterprise software asset, two questions matter most: is the growth repeatable, and does it transfer in due diligence? Trisotech proved repeatability across two consecutive engagements with the same discipline, define the customer, structure the motion, execute the cadence. The largest deals closed because a system was applied, not because a new opportunity appeared. The asset value here is not the customers won; it is the demonstrated capability to identify and convert dormant pipeline inside any acquired CRM. That capability is the multiple-expander.
If today’s AI had been available in 2020
The dormant-pipeline recovery motion run in 2020 did three things manually. Today’s AI does not change the insight or the system, it compounds the running of it.
How Engagement 2 actually ran
- Pattern recognition across three months of prospect data, manual analysis to surface the dormant customer segment
- Account research before each in-person presentation, built by hand, account by account
- Cadence management for 3 to 4 weekly in-person presentations, tracked in a structured weekly rhythm
The same insight, accelerated by AI
- AI lead-scoring runs the dormant-pattern detection continuously, surfaced in real time, not discovered as a project
- AI account intelligence keeps stakeholder maps and buying-committee changes fresh, live, not point-in-time
- Conversation intelligence captures post-meeting coaching and automates the follow-up, cadence runs itself
“The dormant-pipeline insight does not require AI to work. AI just makes it run continuously rather than as a project.”