Executive dinners revived a set of stalled prospects that standard follow-up hadn't reached.
A platform selling into senior decision-makers who move slowly and skeptically
Humankind sold into the eCommerce retail space, a market where the buyers who matter most are senior operators with limited time and a long list of vendors already competing for their attention. Deals in this space rarely close just because a product can solve a problem. They close because a prospect trusts the team behind the product enough to keep the conversation open.
Sales had already done the work to get a number of accounts to demo. What was missing was a way to deepen the relationship and keep the conversation going long enough to win the deal.
Warm accounts went cold right after the demo stage
A meaningful set of prospects had already engaged with sales, in some cases advancing as far as a demo, before the conversation stalled. The accounts had lost momentum rather than interest, and the standard nurture sequence of emails and check-in calls wasn't enough to pull them back into an active conversation.
Sales needed a reason to re-engage senior prospects that felt worth their time, in a market where those prospects were inundated with vendor outreach every week.
Invitation-only dinners, built around the accounts that mattered most
Working directly with the Humankind sales team, Val built a target list of 20 to 40 stalled accounts in each of two cities, NYC and LA, focusing on senior eCommerce retail leaders where the relationship had stalled after initial sales contact. From that list, she planned invitation-only executive dinners designed to give sales a low-pressure reason to reopen the conversation.
Nurture communications ran before, during, and after each dinner, keeping the relationship moving in the surrounding weeks. Once the two dinners proved out the approach, Val built the process into a repeatable playbook covering event strategy, planning, and execution, giving future events a standard to work from instead of a blank page.
Stalled accounts started moving again, and sales had a repeatable way to make it happen
Sales tracked a marked improvement in engagement across the invited accounts following each dinner, with multiple closed-won deals traced directly back to the program within four months. The event playbook built alongside the dinners extended the approach beyond the two initial cities, giving the team a repeatable process for future stalled accounts.