Leading & enabling teams · Leadership
Building a technical account management team from two people to twenty-six
Own was growing into the enterprise market and needed a team of trusted technical advisers. I was one of its founding members.
- My role
- Founding member, Principal TAM
- Organisation
- Own Company
- When
- October 2020 – February 2024
- Result
- A team of 26, 150+ customers, $29M+ ARR
What was going on
Own provides backup, restore, sandbox seeding, archiving and security assessments for Salesforce. As it moved into enterprise customers, they needed proactive monitoring, technical leadership, incident resolution and best-practice advice. That meant a dedicated TAM team.
At the start, onboarding, escalations and enablement were not standardised. The service needed a framework that could scale with a growing global customer base.
What I was responsible for
As a founding member I designed and put in place the processes that let TAM operations scale worldwide. I also mentored new TAMs, built a learning programme for their technical and consulting skills, and prepared them for Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics certifications. I acted as Incident Commander for critical escalations and worked with product and engineering to represent customers.
What I did
- Built a global onboarding process that standardised key steps and timelines
- Created reusable enablement resources, such as technical documentation and customer-specific presentation templates
- Designed and ran a training programme to speed up junior TAMs’ development and certification
- Set up clear communication channels and incident protocols for high-priority escalations
- Fed customer use cases into product and engineering, reviewing debug logs and running regression testing to resolve complex issues
- Pioneered DR3 Assessment Workshops, a service for customers who wanted better recovery strategies without full TAM services
What changed
The team grew from 2 to 26 people across several regions, supporting more than 150 customers and annual recurring revenue above $29 million. Structured onboarding improved customer satisfaction and engagement, and the training programme helped junior TAMs reach certification faster.
A knock-on effect
The DR3 Assessment Workshops became a standalone service in their own right, and product feedback from the team helped engineering ship features aligned with real customer use.
Doing it responsibly
I kept customer data secure and treated incident handling as a confidentiality matter. As a mentor I made sure learning resources and chances to grow were open to everyone on the team.