10× expansion in six months at a Fortune 50 firm — by giving them the visibility that unfroze stalled ERP decisions.

Decision paralysis, dressed up as a project management problem.

The account had a live Oracle install and a growing appetite for new ERP capability. But every expansion conversation stalled in the same place: they couldn't tell me — or themselves — when their internal engineering team would be free to implement anything new.

Their engineers were spread across Jira and the existing Oracle project tooling with no uniform way to track hours. The project backlog was 50+ deep. Leadership had no view of when it would clear. That uncertainty had frozen every ERP buying decision on the table.

The pain wasn't the tooling. It was the decision paralysis the tooling was creating. Every conversation about new spend hit the same wall: we don't know what we can absorb.

Not another PM tool. The visibility layer.

Every competitor in the room — including Jira with Tempo — was pitched as "better project management." That framing kept losing because the account didn't want more project management. They had project management. They wanted a way to score the backlog, tie hours to project value, and see what was worth doing next.

The Oracle product could license thousands of engineers individually, each tied to a unique HRIS ID that already existed in their ERP. That meant it didn't require a process change — engineers kept working in Jira for day-to-day PM. The product sat on top and turned all that activity into profitability data.

The reposition was simple: this isn't a PM upgrade. It's the visibility layer that unblocks every buying decision downstream of it. Once leadership saw it that way, the frame of the whole account shifted.

Two champions. Two different problems. One story.

The technical champion was the Director of Systems. He knew the ERP footprint cold, but he couldn't get expansion decisions moving until someone could tell him what the engineering team could realistically absorb. He needed timelines and rough costing so he could sequence what to buy next.

The economic champion was the VP of Project Management. She owned the budget and signed off on expansions. What she needed was a way to rank internal projects, attach a cost to each, and put a timeline against them — so she could manage up to executive leadership with real numbers.

Neither of them could move the account alone. The Director knew what to buy. The VP had the budget to buy it. Once I connected the two conversations — his technical case + her budget and ROI story — the account started moving in weeks instead of quarters.

From there the sales motion was standard but disciplined: brought in the Oracle solutions team for a custom demo, ran a lightweight POC on their real project data, and wrote the internal business case for the VP to walk into procurement with. $25k proof phase in August. +$100k in October once the data was landing. Another +$100k in February.

Procurement almost killed it. Here's how I saved it.

When the expansion hit procurement, they had one non-negotiable ask: early-renew and co-term every license contract to the ERP end date. Some of those contracts had 2+ years left. Others had 9 months. Procurement wanted a single co-terminated stack so they could manage the account as one line item going forward.

Internally this was a challenge. Co-terming meant giving up 12–18 months of renewal uplift revenue on the contracts that still had runway. That's real money to a sales org. Standard practice would be to say no and negotiate a different concession.

I made the internal case that the co-term was the price of admission on the expansion — that the upside on the multi-product growth story dwarfed the near-term uplift we'd give up on renewals. I ran the numbers: total contract value trajectory over 24 months with and without the co-term, projected expansion path across adjacent modules, and the strategic value of locking pricing at the current level before the next renewal cycle.

I got the internal approval. Procurement got the co-term they needed. The customer signed. Expansion pricing was locked to the ERP end date, which meant every future module conversation started from a position of strength.