Not trying to rant, just genuinely curious if anyone else has dealt with something like this.
I joined a company as an “Account Manager,” but there were no accounts. It was basically a full outbound role under a different title (and lower base).
So I just treated it like a green AE role and started figuring it out myself. No real playbook, no real guidance.
What ended up working for me was getting out from behind the computer and doing everything in person. Instead of just emailing ownership groups, I started going directly to buildings, talking to doormen, leasing offices, resident managers, whoever would actually talk to me. From there I’d work my way up to the right people.
I also started putting together quick mockups using photos from the buildings so people could actually see what we were pitching instead of trying to explain it over email. That helped a lot with getting people to take it seriously.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was repeatable and it did lead to real deals.
The weird part is none of that really got picked up internally. There’s still a heavy focus on top-down outreach and “going straight to ownership,” even though in practice that’s not really how deals get done in this space. I get it, but I have received no recognition.
At the same time, the product has gotten harder to sell. It looks good, installs clean, etc., but there’s no real revenue share or direct upside for the building. So most conversations end up in the same place: people like it, but don’t really feel a reason to move forward.
Just curious if anyone else has run into a situation where:
- your title didn’t match the actual job
- you had to build your own approach from scratch
- what worked in the field didn’t really align with how leadership thought about selling
Not trying to complain, more just trying to sanity check if this is normal in early-stage / evolving teams.