75% More Fortune 2000 Deals in a Quarter, Same Team: The BrandActive Turnaround

A 30-year-old firm built on referrals had a team that could open enterprise conversations and rarely close them. Here is how they fixed the close, in their SVP's words.

Executive Summary: BrandActive, a 30-year-old firm selling to Fortune 2000 buyers, lived on referral revenue and struggled to close direct-to-enterprise deals. Over nine months they installed a qualification-first close motion and coached reps on live deals for four months before any formal training. In Q1 2026 they closed 75% more enterprise deals than Q1 2025. Deal sizes run from $100K to multiple seven figures.

Results at a glance

• 75% more closed enterprise deals, Q1 2026 vs Q1 2025

• Deal sizes from $100K to multiple seven figures

• Four months of live-deal coaching before "formal training"

• First signals inside 90 days; full installation over 6 to 9 months

What was BrandActive struggling with?

BrandActive sells to Fortune 2000 companies going through brand changes: mergers, acquisitions, refreshes. The kind of work where doing it wrong costs tens of millions. Thirty years old. A respected name. A loyal referral base.

And a sales team that could not consistently close direct-to-client deals.

One rep had hit a 100% reply rate on cold outbound to Fortune 2000 buyers. Half of those replies booked calls. The top of the funnel worked. The close did not.

Why did 30 years of referrals stop working?

For three decades, partners and repeat referrals delivered the right buyer at the right moment. The deal was qualified before the first conversation. The buyer already knew they had a problem and had a frame of reference for the cost.

Direct-to-client is a different game. The buyer often does not know they have a problem yet. A brand change is a once-in-a-career event. They are not waiting for a vendor to call.

That is the qualification gap, and it kills more established orgs than anything else when they push into enterprise outbound. Sarah Icely Hill, SVP of Growth at BrandActive, described the buried problem this way:

"Most people, when they think about a brand change, don't even factor in that it could cost tens of millions of dollars more or less depending on how you do it. They may not even see what's coming."

What did BrandActive try first?

The honest list: books, industry articles, internal playbooks, team meetings about the playbooks, AI, new hires expected to bring the methodology with them.

"We started building a lot of things, but they were never quite robust enough to really be used all of the time. And we never really had the time to do a full-on training."

The bottleneck was never knowledge. Sarah had read the books and knew the frameworks. What the team lacked was a way to install those frameworks across a group that had run one way for years. Exposure is easy. Installation is the hard part.

What was the one move that changed everything?

Four months of live deal rooms and prep calls before any formal training.

Most firms show up with a playbook, run a two-day training, and leave. Adoption dies in week three. BrandActive did the opposite. For four months, reps ran real Fortune 2000 deals with the framework and got coached on actual prospect calls. Real budget. Real stakeholders. Real qualification gaps.

"Sometimes you have someone come in and they give you a playbook and you're like, but no one thinks like that. That's not right."

By running live deals first, the reps adapted the methodology to their own voice before it was set in stone. By the time the official training happened, the team was ratifying a system they already trusted.

What did the first six months actually feel like?

It was not all clean wins. The work happened next to the day job. Reps were closing enterprise deals while learning a new system on the same calls. Change management turned out to be harder than process design.

Then the team started building its own data discipline, pulling examples from calls where reps qualified well and calls where they did not. The pattern was obvious.

"We get ghosted when we don't qualify the deal. And no one likes that."

That line became the team's shared language. The methodology stopped being a Venli thing and became a BrandActive thing.

What were the results?

Q1 2026 closed enterprise deals were up 75% over Q1 2025. Same product. Same market. A different sales motion. With deal sizes from $100K to multiple seven figures, that lift compounds into millions in additional revenue per quarter.

The bigger shift was predictability. The top closer is no longer the only person closing. Reps who used to stall mid-funnel now run the same plays the senior reps run. When the qualification process gets skipped, the deal gets ghosted. When it gets run, the deal moves.

"We can actually help people claim their seat at the table during these moments of change."

Asked where BrandActive would be without the change, Sarah was direct:

"We'd be those spinning ducks. Looking busy. Going nowhere. Still trying to find the starting line."

What should a sales leader take from this?

If your team is booking meetings and stalling at the close, you have BrandActive's problem. The fix starts with one question you probably cannot answer with data today: where exactly is the deal dying, and why? That is what the Executive Snapshot is built to surface.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you close more enterprise deals?

Fix the process, not just the top of the funnel. BrandActive was booking Fortune 2000 meetings, with one rep hitting a 100% cold reply rate, but stalling at the first few meetings. After installing a qualification-first motion and getting coached on live deals for four months before any training, they closed 75% more enterprise deals in a single quarter.

Why do B2B deals stall after the first meeting?

Usually a qualification gap. The buyer is interested but has not been helped to see the cost of inaction or build the internal case. BrandActive found its deals got ghosted whenever reps skipped qualification, and moved whenever they ran it.

How do you improve sales win rate without adding reps?

Standardize how every rep runs the deal so results stop depending on one or two reps. BrandActive lifted closed enterprise deals 75% in a quarter with the same team and the same market by installing a single motion the whole team runs.

How do you break into enterprise (Fortune 2000) sales?

Build a direct-to-enterprise motion with real qualification, because enterprise buyers often do not know they have a problem yet. BrandActive moved off referral-only revenue and closed 75% more Fortune 2000 deals in a quarter after rebuilding its close.

Want results like BrandActive's, enterprise deals that actually close? Book a free Executive Snapshot below.