About Ian Matthews

I trained as an electronic engineer and moved into sales at National Instruments, which is where I first saw commercial execution as a poorly instrumented system. Eighteen years there took me from the field to leading the aerospace and defence business across EMEA, which I grew into the region's second-largest industry in three years, and then to running STEP, a global sales transformation across 1,500+ sellers in 40+ countries that moved the company onto one go-to-market model and one CRM.

At NGDATA and Eccella I did the opposite kind of work: building a go-to-market function from first principles through a post-acquisition pivot from data services to software, with a fraction of the resources and none of the inherited structure.

I joined Teradata to run revenue operations for EMEA, taking the region from the lowest CRM adoption in the company to the global benchmark in 18 months. Since 2021 I've held global VP roles across GTM strategy, planning, incentives, field operations and renewals. In that time I've unified fragmented regional models into one global system, run a seven-week redesign of the whole go-to-market organisation, built and globalised the renewals function before handing it to a leader developed in the team, and created the governed context layer that now sits underneath both sellers and AI agents.

I run these frameworks at global enterprise scale, and I write them so they work in a much smaller business too. The sequence that holds a $1.5B business together is the same one a company needs when it's planning its first sales hires. There are fewer moving parts, but the order doesn't change. Everything I write is meant to hold from a startup's first sales team up to a sales organisation of around 2,000.