When McKesson - then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500 - acquired Emendo, the business I'd built in New Zealand, I thought the hard part was behind me. What I actually got was a masterclass in how B2B sales works at a scale most of us never see up close. A few of those lessons changed how I sell, and how I coach founders now.
Selling to and inside a company that size is a different world to selling out of a New Zealand start-up. Here's what stuck.
1. At scale, the process is the product
In a start-up, revenue often rides on one or two brilliant people who can sell. At scale, that doesn't work - you can't clone your best rep. What travels is the process: a documented, repeatable way to find, qualify, progress and close a deal that a new person can pick up and run. It's less romantic than the rainmaker story, but a good process beats a great individual every time you need to do it more than once. For a founder, that's the shift - stop being the sales hero, start building the system.
2. The buyer is a committee, not a person
Big deals aren't sold to a champion. They're sold to a room - procurement, security, finance, the economic buyer, the end users, and the person whose budget it is. Your champion can't say yes on their own; they can only say yes on behalf of a group you'll mostly never meet. So the job isn't to convince one person. It's to arm your champion with what they need to win the argument internally when you're not there. Miss that and the deal quietly dies in a meeting you weren't invited to.
3. "No decision" is the real competitor
At a start-up you obsess about rivals. At scale you learn the truth: most deals aren't lost to a competitor, they're lost to inertia. The status quo is free, safe and already installed. Doing nothing is the easiest decision any buyer can make. So you're not really selling against another vendor - you're selling against "let's revisit this next year". That changes how you sell: you have to make the cost of staying still feel real and urgent, not just make your product look good.
4. Discipline beats heroics
The thing that surprised me most was how unglamorous big-company selling is. Forecasting you can trust. Honest qualification. Pipeline hygiene. Knowing the real next step on every deal. It's boring, and it's exactly how large, predictable revenue gets built. Heroics get you a good quarter. Discipline gets you a good decade.
What this means for a New Zealand founder
You don't need to be McKesson to use any of this. The same discipline that runs a Fortune 500 sales organisation is what gets a New Zealand company its first ten offshore deals - a repeatable process, selling to the whole buying group, beating "no decision", and running your pipeline like you mean it. And the reality is, that's a bigger lever for most founders than any new product feature.
Want to know if your sales foundations travel?
Start with my free Growth Scorecard - about 6 minutes, self-scored - to see where your growth is breaking, from pitch to pipeline to process. And when you're weighing an offshore move, the Global Growth OS runs eleven expansion diagnostics across your business.
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