+200%: what sits behind that recommendation

There is a public recommendation on my LinkedIn profile that mentions "+200% growth in revenue and prospect connections". Every time someone brings it up, I feel the urge to explain everything that number does not say.

The first role

I started as an Applications Engineer at an Autodesk reseller in Colombia. I installed software, ran trainings, solved tickets. Seen from the outside, I was the technical link in a commercial chain. Seen from the inside, I was learning the craft that would define everything else: translating. Listening to a problem the way an engineering manager tells it and turning it into something the software can solve. And walking the reverse path: explaining a technical capability in terms of hours, errors and deliveries.

The same craft under other names

Over time I moved to Key Account Manager, then Commercial Director, then Manager of Commercial Innovation and Services. It sounds like a commercial career, and it was. But deep down I never changed craft, only scale.

Understanding the client's real problem before talking about licenses. Building the demo with data from their industry, not the sample file that ships with the installer. Staying after the sale until the tool is actually used, because a license without adoption is a future reproach with a vendor logo on it.

That is what sits behind the +200% a client reported in that recommendation. Not a closing technique: presales that diagnoses instead of reciting features.

Why diagnosis moves the number

A generic demo competes on price, because the client sees no difference between your proposal and the next one. A diagnosis competes on value: when the demo runs on the client's data and attacks the bottleneck they themselves described the week before, the conversation stops being "how much does it cost" and becomes "when do we start".

And the effect compounds: the client who felt someone understood their problem comes back, refers and connects. The prospect connections in that recommendation did not come from a purchased list; they came from work that recommends itself.

That craft also pushed me to study the other side of the table: a double MBA, at Universidad Santo Tomás and at EUDE Business School. Not because engineering was not enough, but because translating demands speaking both languages fluently: the technical one and the business one.

What changed and what did not

Today the medium is different: I founded asistIA, I work as Senior Consultant, AI Solutions at Avant Leap, and I build custom solutions and AI agents inside Autodesk products. Today's technology does things that would have looked like science fiction in my Applications Engineer years.

But the lesson has not changed: technology closes deals when someone translated the problem first. An impressive AI agent without a well diagnosed problem is a demo. A humble script on a well understood problem is a business.

If your channel or your team sells technology without translation, that is probably the process stealing the most hours from you. And it does not even show up in a report.