Fractional VP of Sales for supply chain and logistics software companies
Operations buyers don’t buy software. They buy fewer bad days.
Warehouse management, inventory and order orchestration, transportation, planning, visibility, manufacturing execution — supply chain software is sold to people who run physical operations and get called when something breaks. My career started on the plant floor, designing and selling process systems, MES and controls, then ERP into manufacturing, then order management and supply chain at IBM and Kibo. I have sold from the shop floor to the storefront for 30+ years. This page is how the supply chain sale actually works, and what I do inside it as a fractional VP of Sales.
Based in Scottsdale, Arizona. I work in person across Greater Phoenix and remotely with founders across the US.
The operator feels the pain. The committee pays for the fix.
A VP of supply chain or a DC general manager will tell you exactly what is broken. Getting that pain funded takes a group of people who are judged on very different numbers.
- Operations. Supply chain, distribution, fulfillment, plant leadership. Judged on cost per unit, on-time, inventory accuracy and safety.
- IT and the ERP owner. Your integration with SAP, Oracle, NetSuite or Microsoft is the first technical question and often the last one.
- Finance. Working capital, freight spend, labor. They want the payback in months, in their numbers.
- Procurement. Vendor risk, references in the same industry, and a strong preference for the vendor already in the building.
- The floor. Supervisors and associates. If scanning, picking or receiving gets slower, adoption dies quietly.
Most founders sell operations and lose to the ERP owner’s integration worry or finance’s payback math. Both can be answered before the evaluation, not during it.
Speak in cost per unit, not features.
Supply chain buyers are numerate and skeptical. They have been promised savings before. The winning business case is built in their units, from their data, and checked by their finance team before you ask for a signature.
What a business case needs to carry
- The baseline today, from the buyer’s own reports: cost per order, mis-ships, inventory turns, freight per unit, labor hours.
- A conservative improvement range, tied to a site or a lane you can measure.
- The full cost to get there: software, integration, training, and the disruption during go-live.
- Payback in months, in the fiscal year the buyer cares about.
- A peak-season plan. Nobody changes a warehouse system in November.
A pilot site with an agreed baseline, a measure and a decision date turns into a rollout. A pilot without them turns into a case study nobody reads.
The ERP is the incumbent, even when it isn’t a competitor.
Almost every supply chain deal is decided partly by how you sit next to the system of record. The ERP vendor, the integrator who maintains it, and the IT team who owns it all have a say.
- Show the integration, don’t describe it. A reference architecture with the ERP, the WMS and the carriers, and who owns each connection.
- Recruit the integrator. The ERP partner who maintains the customer’s system can recommend you or bury you.
- Answer “why not the ERP module?” before it is asked. Usually the answer is time to value, depth, and the cost of customizing the ERP.
I sold ERP into manufacturing early in my career, then sold order management that had to live next to it. I know both sides of that conversation.
From the plant floor to the storefront.
I started as a design engineer on process systems, then sold plant-floor automation, MES and controls into petrochemical, food and beverage, plastics and manufacturing. At JBA Software I sold ERP into discrete and repetitive manufacturing, apparel, food and beverage and automotive suppliers.
At IBM I sold the commerce and supply chain portfolio, including Sterling Order Management, and at Kibo I sold order management and inventory orchestration globally. The buyer changed over the years. The questions they ask about operations, integration and payback didn’t.
Where I sold it from
Fractional VP of Sales for supply chain founders.
I help you run the sales motion and bring you in only where the founder is the difference. For a supply chain or logistics software company that usually means:
- An ICP by industry, network size, ERP and trigger — new DC, acquisition, peak failure, carrier change, new COO.
- A business-case model in the buyer’s units that their finance team can check.
- A committee map that includes the ERP owner, finance and the floor, not just operations.
- An integrator and ERP-partner strategy, with joint pipeline on named accounts.
- A pilot-site plan with baseline, measure and decision date agreed before go-live.
- A forecast built on what each buyer has actually done, not on operations’ enthusiasm.
Supply chain software, answered.
Do you work with manufacturing software as well as logistics?
Yes. MES, quality, maintenance, planning and anything that runs a plant or a network. My career started on the plant floor, and the buying committee — operations, IT, finance, the floor — is the same shape.
We sell to mid-market distributors, not Fortune 500 shippers. Does this still apply?
Yes, and the cycle is usually shorter. A 200-person distributor still has an owner or COO, an ERP, a finance lead and a warehouse manager who all have to agree. The motion is the same with fewer layers.
How do we beat “we’ll just use the ERP module”?
Show time to value and total cost honestly. The ERP module looks free until the customization, the consultants and the wait are added up. Get the ERP owner and finance into that comparison early, with numbers they trust.
When should a supply chain startup hire its first salesperson?
When someone other than the founder has closed a deal through the full committee, or is close. Before that a hire inherits an experiment. When do you need a VP of Sales covers the timing.
Are you a full-time hire in disguise?
No. I am a fractional VP of Sales: senior, part-time, inside your deals for as long as the work needs it, then handed over, handed back or kept running as advisory. Services explains the shapes.
Notes from inside these deals.
When do you need a VP of Sales?
When do you need a VP of Sales? Not full-time yet, but sooner than you think. The deal signals, your three options, and when to hire a fractional VP of Sales.
Why enterprise deals stall after the demo
If a deal dies after the demo, it is rarely because the demo was bad. It is because you never mapped who can actually say yes.
Getting out of founder-led sales without losing the deals
Transitioning away from founder-led sales fails when the founder hands deals to a VP before a motion exists. Here is the sequence that keeps the deals, a 90-day plan, and how to hand off a live deal.
Other industries I work in: Retail technology · AI & computer vision · B2B companies in any industry · B2B SaaS · eCommerce & order management · Point of sale & store technology
Thirty minutes. Bring the operations deal that keeps slipping a quarter.
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