The EiR programme, part of the Strengthen Entrepreneurship and Innovation Pillar under the Enhancing Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Investments (3Ei) initiative, connects regional and international practitioners with local ecosystem actors to deepen technical expertise and strengthen entrepreneurial capacity across Cambodia.
Ms. Petra Wagner has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise sales, sales leadership, partner ecosystems, and go-to-market execution, including roles at IBM and Microsoft. She is the founder of Petra SalesBooster, creator of the SalesBooster Framework, and author of Buyer Sense Conversations: How Founders Help Buyers Make Confident Decisions in Complex B2B Deals. She helps startup founders, scaleups, and B2B sales teams move from random selling and unclear customer conversations to structured sales execution, stronger buyer understanding, and confident deal progression. Drawing on experience from both sides of the table, having sold into complex enterprise environments and acted as a buyer in major technology and transformation decisions, her work focuses on how customers actually make decisions, manage risk, align stakeholders, and commit to change.
Her mission commenced on 3 August 2026 with the full-day workshop “From Customer Acquisition to Retention: Building Repeatable Sales Systems,” organized by 3Ei. The session focused on helping founders understand the fundamentals of a repeatable sales system, define their ideal customer profile and value proposition, strengthen customer acquisition and retention approaches, improve sales conversations and pipeline management, and apply practical sales tools to support business growth.
The workshop was attended by 28 startups and SMEs, who used tools including Sales System Mapping, the Customer Acquisition Canvas, and the Customer Health Scorecard to structure their own sales processes. Participant feedback highlighted the buyer’s journey, the ideal customer profile, value proposition design, customer segmentation, and the structured sales system as key areas of learning, while identifying sales closing, AI tools for SMEs, B2B and SaaS sales, and digital sales strategy as areas for further support.
On 4 August 2026, Ms. Petra Wagner facilitated a half-day workshop on “Deal Acceleration & Closing Techniques” at Smart Startup Space, in collaboration with Smart Axiata. The session introduced practical approaches to running effective first sales conversations, understanding buyer decision-making in B2B and enterprise sales, handling objections with confidence, and structuring next steps to move deals forward. The workshop was attended by 29 founders, managers, and members of the Smart Axiata sales team, who used the LAER (Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, Respond) framework, discovery questioning, and role-play exercises to practise objection handling and deal closing. Participant feedback highlighted objection handling, buyer decision-making, discovery questions, and sales conversation clarity as key takeaways, while identifying buyer psychology and the B2B selling cycle, value and pricing, and digital marketing and sales channels as areas for further support.
On 6 August 2026, Ms. Petra Wagner facilitated a half-day workshop on “From Maybe to Money” at Techo Startup Center (TSC), in collaboration with TSC under the SparkMeet programme. The session supported founders in identifying real, paying customers rather than merely interested ones, validating willingness to pay early, converting first interest into a first deal, and turning one deal into a repeatable sales process. The workshop was attended by 32 startups and SMEs, who used the behavioural signals of real buyers, the money conversation techniques, and deal debriefing to assess their own opportunities and pricing approaches. Participant feedback highlighted the money conversation, distinguishing real buyers from interested ones, validating willingness to pay, and turning interest into commitment as key takeaways, while identifying handling objections, closing more sales, and AI for business as areas for further support.
Alongside the workshops, Ms. Petra Wagner conducted one-on-one mentoring with 13 startups under the Smart Support Programme, the 5th Digital Platform Accelerator (DPA) Programme, and other 3Ei-supported programmes during her mission.
Petra Wagner’s mission brought together support at multiple levels of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, from repeatable sales systems and deal closing to revenue conversion and one-on-one mentoring. Across the engagements, the central message was consistent: stronger sales capability requires structured systems, disciplined buyer understanding, confident deal progression, and the practical tools that turn early customer interest into sustainable revenue.
The Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) Programme is part of the Strengthen Entrepreneurship and Innovation initiative under the Enhancing Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Investments (3Ei) Initiative. It is funded by Khmer Enterprise (KE), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), and co-implemented by Khmer Enterprise (KE) and Swisscontact in Cambodia.