In an industry where customers have experienced vendors who overpromise and underdeliver, our sales approach has changed fundamentally. We don’t lead with products. We lead with understanding.
This shift reflects a broader transformation at Imagine: from transactional vendor relationships to genuine partnerships built on trust, transparency, and shared success.
From vendor to partner
The primary shift in our sales approach has been moving from customer-vendor transactions to establishing partnerships from the very beginning. This means understanding what customers are trying to achieve, what constraints they’re working within, and how we can help them succeed — not just what products we can sell them.
We don’t want to be everything to everyone. We want to focus where we know we can deliver exceptional value. That starts with the culture and DNA of Imagine: quality-focused, trusted, dependable. We’re not going to sell you things we can’t deliver.
Selling with alignment
Consultative selling isn’t new to us. Our ad tech business has operated this way for years. What’s changed is we’re now bringing that discipline across our entire organization, including production infrastructure and playout systems where the industry has traditionally been more transactional.
Instead of relying on a single champion within a customer organization, we now engage at multiple levels: executive leadership to ensure business alignment, operational teams to understand technical requirements, and end users to get their buy-in on adopting new solutions. This comprehensive approach ensures everyone is aligned before we commit.
And it’s not just our sales team involved. We bring together expertise from across Imagine: product and engineering leaders who understand the technology roadmap and know how to execute it; professional service leaders who can speak to implementation realities; and customer care leaders who know what sustainable support looks like. We connect with customer peers at multiple organizational levels to validate that we understand their needs correctly and that our proposed solutions align with their business objectives.
This is selling with alignment: internal teams collaborating closely, engaging customers as partners, and ensuring everyone moves together toward shared goals and measurable outcomes.
The discipline behind the partnership
Partnership requires discipline — internal discipline that sets us apart in the industry. When our salespeople close a deal, it’s not just about winning the business. It’s about winning profitable business that we can deliver successfully.
We require our sales team to understand the financial implications of what they’re selling. We record commitments internally and get cross-functional sign-off before we commit to customers. This ensures we’re not selling something at a price we can’t support or promising features we can’t deliver.
This level of discipline surprises salespeople when they join us from competitors. They’re used to focusing purely on closing deals. At Imagine, you’re accountable for the entire customer relationship, including ensuring that what you sold is successfully delivered.
Learning from experience
We don’t hide from our history. Several years ago, a major, next-generation, multisite playout origination project taught us critical lessons about customer alignment. If a customer’s engineering team and operations team aren’t aligned on what they want, no vendor can succeed — no matter how good the technology is.
When we recently undertook a similar project in another region, we applied those lessons. We ensured executive alignment on both sides from day one. We committed to making it work together: transparently communicating challenges when they arose and collaboratively solving them. The result? A successful multisite deployment that our customer cited as a real-world example of what a strong, enduring partnership can achieve.
Global insights, local application
One of our unique strengths is the breadth of our global customer base. We support a wide range of customers across regions and across our Make and Monetize portfolios. This diversity gives us something that is unique to Imagine: the ability to share proven approaches from both portfolios that help drive success across different markets.
When a European broadcaster was planning a major transformation, we connected them with a North American broadcaster to learn from their experience. These aren’t competitors; they’re broadcasters in different markets facing similar challenges. Our willingness to facilitate these connections demonstrates our confidence in our partnerships.
Regular engagement that matters
We’ve formalized our engagement cadence with top customers through quarterly business reviews. These aren’t sales pitches; they’re strategic discussions about operational success, upcoming projects, and technology roadmaps. They create visibility into future pipeline and help both sides prepare for what’s next.
We’re also revitalizing user groups and workshops, bringing together customers with similar use cases to share best practices and shape our product direction. This community-building reinforces that we’re not just selling technology; we’re facilitating an ecosystem of success.
The result
Selling with alignment takes longer. It requires more investment up front. But it produces lasting partnerships and, frankly, better business outcomes.
Our customers come back to us because they trust us. They recommend us to others because we’ve delivered on our promises. They engage with us at senior levels because we’ve proven we understand not just technology, but their business.
As multiple customers have told us, the level of collaboration they experience with Imagine — with our sales, product, engineering, professional services, and customer care teams working together on their behalf — simply doesn’t happen with other vendors.
That’s not how you operate when you’re just selling products. That’s how you operate when you’re genuinely invested in your customers’ success.
And that’s exactly who we are.
Imagine Executive Blog Series
Want to see where it all started? CEO Steve Reynolds outlines how Imagine changed its internal culture — strengthening responsiveness, accountability, and delivery discipline to rebuild customer trust.
