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# Interview: Frank Wilson - Industrial IoT CRO ## Metadata **Date:** January 2, 2026 **Duration:** 30 minutes **Interviewer:** Maria Chen, Enterprise Solutions Director, Salesloft + Clari **Interviewee:** Frank Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer, Industrial IoT Solutions (Manufacturing Division) **Company ARR:** $130M **Industry:** Industrial IoT, Smart Manufacturing **Interview Type:** Customer Discovery / Solution Fit Analysis --- ## Transcript **[MARIA]** Frank, thanks so much for taking the time today. I know things are busy in the manufacturing tech space right now. Before we dive in, I'd love to understand where you're at with revenue operations and what's keeping you up at night on the sales side. **[FRANK]** Maria, I appreciate it. Look, we're in this interesting moment where we're growing fast—the IoT adoption in manufacturing is real—but we're hitting some walls that pure product isn't solving. We went from $60M to $130M ARR in three years, which is great, but our sales efficiency took a hit. We're not scaling our close rates the way we should be, and I think a lot of it comes down to how fragmented our deals are on the customer side. **[MARIA]** Fragmented—can you give me an example? **[FRANK]** So here's the thing. In traditional enterprise software, you're selling to the CTO or VP of Engineering. They own the decision. With us, we're selling into manufacturing plants, which means we're dealing with Operations Technology—the OT team—and the IT infrastructure team. They speak completely different languages. OT cares about uptime, production loss, safety compliance. IT is worried about network security, integration, maintenance burden. And neither of them wants to talk to the other until we force them to. **[MARIA]** That's the OT/IT divide I've read about. How does that actually play out in your deals? **[FRANK]** It's brutal. We'll close the plant manager on reducing downtime—that's their primary metric. They see a 15-20% reduction in unplanned maintenance and they're sold. But then IT steps in and says, "This needs to integrate with our enterprise systems, what's the security posture, how do we monitor it?" And the conversation that should take two weeks now takes four months because these teams aren't aligned. The plant manager doesn't have budget authority over IT. The CIO doesn't report to the plant manager. You've got regional directors, corporate procurement, sometimes even safety and compliance teams getting involved. **[MARIA]** So you're selling to multiple personas across disconnected organizational structures. How do you currently handle the messaging? **[FRANK]** Honestly, we're not handling it that well yet. That's part of why I wanted to talk to you. We have standard decks for "Operations" and "IT," but we're not systematically identifying champions or mapping out who actually influences what. Our reps are good—they're technical, they understand manufacturing—but they're treating each deal like a bespoke problem. We're not scaling our approach. **[MARIA]** Let me ask about champions specifically. When you land one person who gets it, does that help accelerate everything else? **[FRANK]** Yes, but we need the *right* champion in the right function. I've seen deals where we had a strong champion in Operations, but they didn't have the clout to push IT to move faster. We ended up waiting six months for IT priorities to shift. Conversely, we've had a CIO champion who wanted to move fast, but Operations was skeptical about the reliability and didn't want to pilot. A champion only works if they have cross-functional credibility. **[MARIA]** That's a critical insight. Have you tried deliberately building multi-champion strategies? **[FRANK]** We're experimenting with it. Our best reps intuitively do it—they'll get Operations bought in, then have the Operations person introduce them to IT, and they'll work both relationships. But again, not systematized. We're flying by the seat of our pants on deal structure. Some deals have champions, some don't, and we don't have a playbook for which situations need what approach. **[MARIA]** Okay, let's shift to pilots, because I know that's another pain point. You mentioned the 15-20% downtime reduction—that sounds like a pretty attractive outcome. **[FRANK]** Right, so pilots are attractive. Everyone wants to try us at a single plant first. That makes total sense. We deploy sensors, integrate with their systems, monitor for two to three months, prove the downtime reduction. And it works. Our pilots have like a 78% conversion rate, which is actually pretty good. **[MARIA]** That's strong. So what's the problem? **[FRANK]** Expansion doesn't happen as cleanly. We close the pilot at Plant A, the customer sees results, and then they say, "Great, let's expand to Plants B, C, and D." And we say, "Perfect, here's what the rollout looks like." But then... **[MARIA]** But then? **[FRANK]** But then the customer changes the rules. Suddenly the corporate procurement team says, "Now that we're doing this enterprise-wide, we need a new RFP process." Or the CIO says, "We've decided to consolidate on a different platform partner." Or—this is the most painful—the regional director who sponsored the pilot gets transferred, and the new director has different priorities. We lose momentum. **[MARIA]** So you're hitting pilot purgatory. You've proven the ROI, but you can't scale it internally. **[FRANK]** Exactly. We have three customers right now where we're stuck in that phase. Pilot completed six months ago. 22% downtime reduction at the plant. Economics proved out. But corporate won't authorize the rollout budget because they want to audit the results longer, or they want to evaluate competing solutions, or—honestly—it's just sitting in a queue behind other priorities. **[MARIA]** What would have changed that outcome? What would have accelerated expansion from the pilot? **[FRANK]** A few things. First, we needed clearer success criteria upfront. Not just "does it reduce downtime," but "what specific metrics, over what time period, to what baseline, will trigger the expansion decision?" We're now starting to build those into pilot agreements, but we weren't systematically doing that before. **[MARIA]** That's smart. What's second? **[FRANK]** We need a better expansion playbook. I'm talking about the actual plan: which plants get deployed when, what's the resource requirement from the customer, how much support do we need to provide, what's the timeline. Customers want to see that we've thought through scaling, not just piloting. And we want to keep the momentum going—don't let the customer hand us off after 90 days. Keep them engaged. **[MARIA]** And third? **[FRANK]** Sponsorship. The plant manager is all-in on the pilot, but they're not the executive who approves expansion across four plants. We need someone higher up the food chain—the VP of Operations, the COO—to be the sponsor of the multi-plant rollout. That's a different conversation than the pilot conversation. **[MARIA]** So you're saying you need to have cultivated that relationship during the pilot, so when expansion is being discussed, you've got executive air cover. **[FRANK]** Yeah, and we're not always doing that. Our reps are focused on the pilot success. They're not thinking three moves ahead to who needs to approve expansion. That's where I feel like we need better structure and visibility into the account. **[MARIA]** Let's talk about the hard dollar ROI piece, because I think that connects to your sponsorship and pilot expansion challenges. How do you quantify the impact? **[FRANK]** This is where it gets complex. Downtime reduction is real—we can measure it from their maintenance records and production logs. But here's what I mean by "hard dollar": when you reduce unplanned downtime, what's the actual revenue or cost impact? For some customers, that's straightforward. They've got a production bottleneck, so preventing downtime directly increases throughput and output value. We can say, "You'll produce 40 more units per month, at $2,000 per unit, that's $80K in additional monthly revenue." For others, it's more about cost avoidance—you're not paying overtime to emergency maintenance, you're not shipping late and paying penalties. **[MARIA]** And quantifying that second bucket is harder? **[FRANK]** Way harder. Some customers don't even track their costs that way. We ask them about emergency maintenance staffing, and they say, "Well, we've got people on-site anyway, we just reassign them." Okay, what's the opportunity cost? They don't know. Or they'll say, "The plant manager's bonus is tied to uptime, and yours solution helped hit that bonus," but they don't want to share the bonus structure with us. So we get a sense it's valuable, but we can't quantify it in a way that's credible to procurement and finance. **[MARIA]** How do you currently navigate that with your sales team? **[FRANK]** We've developed case studies from our most transparent customers—the ones that *will* share hard numbers. We have a food processing company that tracks everything. They showed us a three-year TCO model with reduced downtime, reduced emergency maintenance, reduced logistics penalties. That case study is gold. We use it for every deal in food and beverage. But for automotive, where the business models are different, we've got less visibility. **[MARIA]** So you're creating persona-based case studies? **[FRANK]** We're starting to, but it's ad-hoc. We should be more systematic about it. Like, "Here are our three reference customers in automotive, here's the ROI methodology we used with them, here's what you should expect to model for your plant." But we don't have a standardized ROI calculator or playbook yet. **[MARIA]** That's a big lift. What's your current process when a customer says, "Show me the ROI"? **[FRANK]** Our Solutions Engineering team builds a custom financial model. They'll get baseline production metrics from the customer, make assumptions about downtime reduction—usually grounded in our pilot data or similar plants—and model out the savings. It's collaborative, it's tailored, but it's also time-intensive. A good ROI analysis takes two to three weeks if the customer is engaged, longer if they're slow to provide data. **[MARIA]** And if they're slow? **[FRANK]** Then the deal stalls. We're waiting on data, they're waiting on our analysis, two weeks becomes six weeks, and meanwhile the sales cycle is getting longer, opportunities are aging, reps are moving on to other deals. The customers who move fast move *fast*, and the ones who move slow drag everything out. **[MARIA]** Which brings us to the overall procurement timeline. Talk to me about the length of your sales cycle. **[FRANK]** Average is nine to eleven months for a mid-market deal. Enterprise can be twelve to eighteen months. **[MARIA]** That's long. **[FRANK]** It's long, but I think it's realistic for what we're selling. We're not replacing a software tool; we're changing how a plant operates and how it connects to corporate systems. You've got procurement reviews, legal reviews, IT security sign-off, sometimes insurance and compliance reviews. It's a lot of gates. **[MARIA]** Walk me through those gates. What's the actual sequence? **[FRANK]** It varies, but roughly: initial discovery and pilot planning with the plant manager and IT lead—that's usually two to three months. Then the pilot itself, two to three months. Post-pilot evaluation, where they're deciding if it's a go for expansion—that's one to two months. Then expansion approvals, procurement, legal, IT—that's three to six months depending on how aligned those stakeholders are. **[MARIA]** So the pilot is only the first third of the timeline. **[FRANK]** Less than that sometimes. And here's the thing—during the pilot, we're not necessarily preparing for the approval phase that comes after. We should be identifying the procurement gatekeepers, the legal requirements, the security requirements early. We should be getting procurement engaged during the pilot, not after. But we're not structured to do that. **[MARIA]** So you're essentially restarting the relationship after the pilot ends. **[FRANK]** Kind of, yeah. The plant manager is still there, but now we're also talking to Procurement, Legal, maybe a Finance team we haven't met yet. And they're asking questions from scratch. "What's your uptime guarantee? What happens if this fails? What are your liability terms?" We should have answers ready, and we should have already built relationships with these people. **[MARIA]** What would parallel workstreams look like for you? **[FRANK]** During the pilot, while Operations is testing the tech, Procurement should be going through our contracting requirements, IT should be doing security reviews, maybe Finance should be building the multi-plant ROI model. So when the pilot ends and the customer wants to expand, all of those pieces are already vetted and approved. We just sign and deploy. **[MARIA]** That requires a lot of coordination on your side. **[FRANK]** It does. We'd need account teams that are structured differently—not just a rep and maybe a Solutions Engineer, but coordination with someone who's managing the deal mechanics, the approvals, the stakeholder sequencing. Right now, our reps are essentially doing that in their head, and some are better at it than others. **[MARIA]** That gets to coaching and deal coaching. How do you currently coach your reps on deal structure? **[FRANK]** We have weekly deal reviews, and our VP of Sales is pretty sharp about asking questions: "Who's your champion? Who's in Procurement? When do you expect IT approval?" Those are good coaching moments. But it's reactive, and it's based on what the rep brings up. We don't have a systematic framework—like, "Here's the deal structure template, here's who you should map, here's what gets done in parallel." **[MARIA]** Do you feel like your reps understand the OT/IT complexity and how to navigate it? **[FRANK]** Our best ones do. We've invested in hiring people who have manufacturing or IoT backgrounds. That's been key. But that creates a scaling problem—those people are hard to find. We can't just hire any good enterprise rep and get them up to speed in 30 days. Manufacturing IoT has domain-specific knowledge. **[MARIA]** Tell me about your hiring profile. **[FRANK]** We look for someone with five to ten years of enterprise sales experience, ideally in industrial, manufacturing, IoT, or automation spaces. But those people are scarce. We've started recruiting from our customer base, from competitors in industrial software. We offer more base salary because we know the ramp is steeper. And we're very deliberate about pairing junior reps with experienced mentors who understand manufacturing. **[MARIA]** How long is your ramp time? **[FRANK]** Nine to twelve months for someone to be fully productive. And I'm talking about fully productive, carrying a quota. The first three months they're learning the product, the vertical, the customer problems. Months three to six they're starting to book meetings but deals aren't closing. By month nine, you're seeing traction. By month twelve, they're hitting quota. **[MARIA]** That's expensive. **[FRANK]** It is. OTE is higher than a standard enterprise role, and they're not productive for a year. It makes our unit economics tighter than I'd like. But the upside is, once they're trained, they really understand the space, and they have strong retention. We have reps who've been with us five, six years, and they know our customers inside and out. **[MARIA]** How are you training them? **[FRANK]** Combination of things. Initial onboarding with product training, then we pair them with customers for ride-alongs. Some of our strongest reps take junior reps into customer calls, show them how to navigate the OT/IT conversation. We've also invested in building a manufacturing fundamentals training—how do plants actually work, what's production scheduling, what's preventive maintenance. Not every rep knows that coming in. **[MARIA]** Do you use Solutions Engineers in training? **[FRANK]** Yes, heavily. Our SE team is actually our strongest resource for deep technical training. We have a few SEs who are ex-manufacturing engineers, and they're invaluable. When a junior rep is confused about integrations or technical feasibility, the SE can explain it in a way that makes sense, and then the rep knows how to position it to the customer. **[MARIA]** Are your SEs also involved in deal coaching? **[FRANK]** Not as much as they should be. They're stretched. We have a ratio of about one SE per four reps, so they're mostly focused on supporting active opportunities—demo, implementation, integration work. They don't have a ton of bandwidth for strategic deal coaching. That's something we've talked about—maybe bringing in a deal manager or a sales operations person to handle that. **[MARIA]** Let me ask you this: if you could wave a magic wand and solve one of these problems—OT/IT alignment, pilot expansion, ROI quantification, procurement complexity, or hiring and training—which would you tackle first? **[FRANK]** That's a good question. Honestly, it's probably the OT/IT alignment and champion strategy, because that's upstream of everything else. If we can't navigate that initial stakeholder map correctly, the pilot doesn't have the right sponsor, the expansion doesn't happen, the ROI doesn't get quantified properly. It all falls apart. We need a repeatable way to identify, engage, and orchestrate the different personas and decision-makers. **[MARIA]** So what would that look like for you? **[FRANK]** Ideally? A framework that tells our reps: here's the typical organizational structure of a mid-market manufacturer, here's who your personas are, here's what each one cares about, here's how to find your champion in each function, here's how to get them aligned. And then visibility into the deal so I can see, "Okay, in this deal, we've got Operations bought in, we're still working on IT, we haven't talked to Procurement yet." And I can help the rep prioritize and coach them through it. **[MARIA]** That's visibility into stakeholder mapping and deal progression. **[FRANK]** Exactly. And connected to that, I'd want to use that visibility to predict which deals are likely to stall. If we're three months into a deal and IT still hasn't engaged, or Procurement hasn't been brought into the conversation, that's a red flag. I want to flag that early and help the rep course-correct. **[MARIA]** Have you looked at solutions that give you that kind of visibility? **[FRANK]** We've looked at some Salesforce add-ons and some vertical-specific tools, but nothing felt like it was purpose-built for our problem. A lot of them are generic stakeholder mapping tools. They don't account for the OT/IT complexity or the typical deal progression in manufacturing. **[MARIA]** What's your comfort level with adding a new tool to your stack? **[FRANK]** We're open to it if it solves a real problem. We're already using Salesforce, a CRM, some Slack integration stuff. Adding something that helps us understand and navigate stakeholder complexity across OT and IT functions—that's high value. But it would need to integrate with Salesforce and not add a lot of manual data entry. Our reps are already drowning in CRM hygiene. **[MARIA]** I hear you. Let me ask a different angle: if we could help you create the playbook for navigating the OT/IT divide, with messaging for each persona, champion selection criteria, and a deal progression model specific to manufacturing, would that be valuable on its own? **[FRANK]** Absolutely. That's actually what I think we need first. We could build that into our sales training and coaching. Give our reps a mental model for how to approach these deals. And then, once we have a playbook, we could look at tools to enforce it and give us visibility. **[MARIA]** Okay, here's another area: you mentioned the long expansion cycle and losing momentum when the pilot sponsor gets transferred. How do you currently mitigate executive churn? **[FRANK]** Not well, to be honest. We rely on the plant manager's relationships, but you're right—people get promoted, transferred, move to different companies. When that happens, we sometimes have to restart the relationship with the new person. It's a drag on expansion timelines. **[MARIA]** What if you had intentionally cultivated a relationship with the VP of Operations or a more stable executive sponsor during the pilot? **[FRANK]** That would help, but it requires us to think beyond the pilot success. We'd need to be proactively engaging the expansion sponsor during the pilot phase, not after. And our reps would need to understand that's part of their job. **[MARIA]** Right. It's part of the overall deal architecture, not a phase two thing. **[FRANK]** Exactly. That gets back to the playbook and coaching. If every rep knows, "In the pilot phase, your job is not just to get technical success; it's to get a standing meeting with the VP of Operations and build a relationship," that changes behavior. **[MARIA]** Let's get tactical for a second. You've got some deals stuck in expansion limbo. What's blocking them? **[FRANK]** One customer, they did a phenomenal pilot. Plant showed 25% downtime reduction. But corporate procurement wants to evaluate two competitors before moving forward. That deal has been stuck for five months. Another one, the pilot was successful, but the CIO got budget cut and they paused all capex approvals for six months. Third one, the plant manager got promoted, new manager came in and wanted to re-pilot because they wanted to see it work under their watch. **[MARIA]** That third one is rough. **[FRANK]** It is. We could probably offer a shortened, compressed pilot to give the new manager confidence without redoing the full 90 days. But we didn't handle it well. We tried to convince them the original pilot was sufficient, and they dug in. Should have been more flexible. **[MARIA]** So operationally, you're seeing deal expansion get blocked by corporate process (Procurement's eval cycle), by external factors (budget freezes), and by organizational changes. All of those require different mitigation strategies. **[FRANK]** Right. For the procurement one, we should have been engaged with Procurement earlier, made sure they were comfortable with us before they were forced to evaluate us. For the budget freeze, we should have had executive sponsorship that elevated the priority. For the new manager, we should have offered a simplified validation path that respected their need to own the decision. **[MARIA]** And that kind of sophistication requires your team to be thinking about stakeholders and deal structure, not just technical success. **[FRANK]** Exactly. That's the maturity we need to build. **[MARIA]** One more area before we wrap: the deep technical knowledge requirement and how that affects your go-to-market. You mentioned hiring is hard because you need manufacturing domain expertise. What's your strategy for scaling that? **[FRANK]** It's a genuine constraint. We've got maybe five people on the sales side who have really deep manufacturing operations knowledge. Trying to build a team of fifty or a hundred reps where everyone has that expertise is not realistic. We need to build leverage around the expertise we do have. **[MARIA]** What does that leverage look like? **[FRANK]** More specialization. Instead of every rep handling plants in different verticals—automotive, food, pharma—we're moving toward vertical specialists. You get deep in auto, you get to know the OEMs, the supply chain dynamics, the pain points. Same for food, pharma, chemical. We're not there yet, but that's the direction. **[MARIA]** And that requires you to hire differently? **[FRANK]** Yeah. Instead of hiring pure sales people and training them on manufacturing, we're hiring people who have been in auto or food manufacturing—maybe not in sales, but as operations managers, supply chain people, consultants—and teaching them sales. It's a different profile, but they ramp faster because they already understand the domain. **[MARIA]** What's your mix right now? **[FRANK]** Maybe 60% domain-first hires, 40% sales-first hires. We're trying to shift that to 75/25 or 80/20, but the domain-first people are harder to source and they often want lower base salary because they're taking a career pivot. It's a different recruiting strategy. **[MARIA]** Does the domain expertise translate to better outcomes on pilot expansion? **[FRANK]** I think it does, yeah. Our vertical specialists have better relationships with customers, better understanding of the expansion implications of the pilot, better ability to navigate the stakeholder complexity. Whereas our more general enterprise sales people are really good at the initial deal mechanics but sometimes miss the domain-specific nuances that affect scaling. **[MARIA]** Have you measured that? **[FRANK]** Not formally, but anecdotally, yes. Our vertical specialist team has higher expansion rates from pilots. They know who to talk to, they understand the operational implications of rolling out across multiple plants. **[MARIA]** That's a strong signal. Okay, Frank, I think I've got a pretty clear picture of where you're at. Let me ask a wrap-up question: if you had to prioritize the three biggest things you need to improve over the next 12 months, what are they? **[FRANK]** One: build and operationalize an OT/IT stakeholder navigation playbook that our reps can execute consistently. Two: create a systematic ROI methodology and case study library by vertical so customers can see credible proof of concept. Three: reduce our average sales cycle from 9-11 months to 7-8 months by getting more stakeholders engaged in parallel during the pilot phase instead of sequentially after. **[MARIA]** Those three things would be transformative. **[FRANK]** They would. And honestly, they're all solvable. We have the customer relationships to build the case studies. We have reps with the domain expertise to build the playbook. We have the deal data to identify where we're getting stuck. We just need to be more intentional about systematizing what we know works. **[MARIA]** Well, I think you've articulated the problem really clearly. What would be helpful from us? **[FRANK]** I think a couple of things. One, I'd love to work with you to build the OT/IT playbook—your experience in other verticals might show us patterns we're missing. Two, I'd want visibility into our deals in a way that lets me see stakeholder engagement and deal progression, so I can predict stalls before they happen. And three, some coaching or training on how to make multi-plant expansion part of the pilot conversation, not an after-thought. **[MARIA]** That's concrete. I think we can help with all three. Let's schedule a follow-up to dive into the playbook and the expansion playbook, and I'll also put some thought into how we can give you better deal visibility in Salesforce. **[FRANK]** Perfect. I appreciate it, Maria. This was really helpful—just talking through it with someone from outside the company, I realize how much we're trying to do organically that could be more systematized. **[MARIA]** That's exactly what I'm here for. I'll send over some frameworks and case studies from other companies in vertical sales, and we'll go from there. **[FRANK]** Sounds great. Let's do it. --- ## Key Takeaways ### 1. OT/IT Organizational Complexity is a Structural Bottleneck - Frank's deals involve disconnected personas across Operations Technology and IT Infrastructure, each with different approval chains - Standard enterprise sales motions don't work; reps need a systematic stakeholder mapping framework - Multi-champion strategies are critical but not yet operationalized at Frank's company ### 2. Pilot-to-Expansion Conversion is the Real Scaling Problem - Pilots have strong conversion rates (78%) but expansion is blocked by corporate process, budget freezes, and organizational changes - Success criteria and expansion playbooks need to be defined upfront, during pilot agreements - Expansion sponsorship must be cultivated with higher-level executives during the pilot phase, not after ### 3. Hard Dollar ROI Quantification Requires Verticalization - Different customer types have different ROI models; cost avoidance is harder to quantify than revenue impact - Reference case studies are essential, especially when they show transparent financial methodology - ROI modeling is time-intensive and a deal stall point; systematization and tools could accelerate this ### 4. Long Procurement Cycles (9-11 months) Can Be Shortened with Parallel Workstreams - Current state: pilot (2-3 months) → evaluation (1-2 months) → approvals (3-6 months) - Opportunity: run procurement, IT security, finance, and legal reviews in parallel with the pilot - Requires shift from rep-centric deal management to structured account team with deal operations focus ### 5. Deep Domain Expertise is Required but Difficult to Scale - Industrial IoT sales reps need manufacturing operations knowledge; this is both a hiring constraint and a competitive advantage - Strategy: shift to domain-first hiring (manufacturing professionals who learn sales) vs. sales-first hiring - Vertical specialization yields better outcomes on stakeholder navigation and expansion rates ### 6. Strategic Interventions (in Priority Order) 1. Build an OT/IT stakeholder playbook with messaging, champion profiles, and deal progression model 2. Create vertical-specific ROI methodologies and case study library 3. Implement parallel workstream management to compress 9-11 month cycles to 7-8 months through early procurement/IT engagement