For a telecom incumbent, the hardest account to grow is the one it already has. Verizon Business sits inside most Fortune 500 companies as the network provider, which means it is trusted, procured and — from the buyer’s point of view — categorized. Executives see a carrier. The security portfolio, managed detection and response, cloud interconnect, mobile edge compute and Private 5G that Verizon wants to sell are bought by different people (CISO, CIO, operations, digital transformation) through different budgets, often from vendors who never had to overcome the “just phones” perception.

Rail is a particularly sharp version of this. A Class I railroad runs 20,000 miles of track, dozens of yards and terminals, unionized field operations, positive train control mandates and a growing cyber-compliance burden from TSA security directives and FRA rules. Its competitor is not another railroad; it is trucking, which wins on speed, visibility and flexibility. Yard dwell time is the metric that decides the contest. Private 5G with edge compute is the technology that can move it — real-time asset visibility, predictive safety alerts, IoT at scale — but yard superintendents want ROI in dwell-time and safety terms, not network terms, and Wi-Fi and 900 MHz radios are “good enough” until someone shows otherwise.

Selling into that requires two conversations at once: a strategic one with the executives who set the transformation agenda, and an operational one with the people who run a specific yard and can sponsor a pilot.

Verizon’s strategic account teams for CSX and FIS wanted to expand from connectivity into the broader portfolio and to re-engage leadership after executive changes. At CSX, the account team heard that Verizon was viewed as reliable but narrow; that leaders moving applications to AWS and Azure did not know Verizon’s cloud-security capabilities; that Private 5G ROI was unclear; that a competitor was courting the account and a neutral host was placing right-of-way nodes; and that terminals doubling throughput were raising safety demands. The network contract ran through 2028, giving Verizon a footprint for a 5G overlay, and the union-run portion of operations was unmanaged — a foothold for managed services. Marketing had assets but no account-specific plan, and sales had relationships but no coordinated cadence.

1. 01A seven-step plan on a page: onboarding and stack alignment, account selection, ABM workshop, ABM strategy, final strategy review, program work, pre-launch debrief
2. 02Two plays per account: Executive Perception (CEO, CFO and COO first, then CFO financial impact, IT leadership and an integrated executive session) and Deal-Based (buying committee to decision makers by engagement, Private 5G as the answer to yard connectivity, a pilot in a flagship yard, then expand and upsell)
3. 03Cadence design: 15 touchpoints over 10 weeks in five cycles — sales email, LinkedIn post 48 hours later, sales call — building from safety and cost proof to industrial case studies to a joint innovation session and a proof-of-concept site proposal
4. 04Persona-level messaging and letters for the deal play, and a PAS-to-CAR framework for an analytical CEO
5. 05An always-on digital surround: CTV to the account, LinkedIn image ads to executives and yard operators, and retargeting
6. 06Contact verification and a LinkedIn connection sprint in the first two weeks
7. 07Reporting: weekly play reports, touchpoint performance against benchmark, CTV and LinkedIn snapshots, a Tableau in-market dashboard, a contacts report, and budget and media trackers
8. 08Sales enablement: a sales playbook, an account health plan, Surprise & Delight moments and an executive PoV
9. 09The same repeatable model applied to FIS in parallel

Every asset was written for one account. Creative carried the railroad’s own program language, and the media surround split by audience: executive creative for the C-suite, rail-yard creative for the operators who would sponsor a pilot.

The program was instrumental in cultivating relationships and meetings with the incoming executive team, including the CEO, and resulted in three pilots at CSX’s busiest railyard. Engagement figures below cover the first ten-week cycle.