How to craft an irresistible offering for corporate buyers

When you’re selling a new climate, nature, or water tech product to corporate buyers, a one-size-fits-all pitch won’t cut it. While your primary contact might sit within one department, they represent one part of the larger ecosystem that will ultimately make the buying decision. This contact’s role is vital as they serve as quarterback internally for you - convincing the other teams of the value of your solution. That means adapting your message so it hits the mark with audiences who have different priorities, and view climate through vastly different lenses. 

Kat Hunt and Erin Baldini lead Transition Strategy and Finance at Earth Finance. We sat down with them to learn about getting the buy-in needed to sell to corporate customers - the different corporate teams you’ll need to impress, what points to highlight with each of them, and what else you need to know before you start pitching to corporate buyers.

What different audiences in corporate care about

1. Finance
Corporate finance teams won’t be persuaded by arguments based on the moral imperative to combat climate change – they care about hard numbers. So, you’ll need to speak their language and make the financial case explicit: projecting potential  ROI, IRR, ROC, and resilience returns as well as the financial resources required over time. 

Frame your work around the metrics and outcomes they care about most. Does this company have an internal carbon fee? Leverage that for the business case you build with your contact. For instance, if customer loyalty is a priority, show how much your product or service could increase customer retention and acquisition. 

2. Marketing
Marketing teams are interested in how your product strengthens their company’s brand reputation and enhances industry leader positioning. They’ll also be wary of promoting sustainability initiatives that could be construed as greenwashing: wishy-washy claims without substantiation. To avoid this, they’ll want to see facts and figures that convey real-world, short-term impacts – minus the technical jargon that doesn’t contribute to their narrative. For storytelling purposes, they’ll also want to understand how this initiative will resonate with and affect stakeholders and any relevant communities. Work with your contact to understand the company's stakeholder mapping and provide information for dissemination on where your solution may have impacts. 

3. Procurement
Procurement teams are intensely relationship oriented and are often managing large workloads with long-standing, embedded purchasing processes. You’ll want to help your contact understand what barriers their procurement teams face, and what is the current dynamic with their suppliers. Sustainability can feel like another requirement, so consider how to relevantly frame your solution as a value add to the procurement team and supplier relationships. Their time is limited and they will understand their supply chains better than you, so leave any assumptions behind and get curious by taking the time to learn about their specific challenges and engage early in goal setting.

4. Legal
Unsurprisingly, legal teams are highly risk averse, but this can work in your favor. You’ll want to frame climate action as not only a way to future-proof their business - against unwanted penalties, legal cases, and reputational damage - but a path to resilience building. 

Beyond emphasizing the risks associated with inaction, focus on making the derisking and contracting process as smooth as possible for the legal team. Entering contract reviews is a huge barrier to corporate progress, generally, so having your ducks in a row will serve you immensely. Once you have their attention, show how your solution provides a defense against these outcomes by helping to identify and mitigate risks. And, it’s easy to put our eggs into a particular basket when there’s momentum with a potential corporate buyer/strategic investor, so be sure to include your own legal counsel so contract negotiations don’t lose sight of what your current operations are capable of.

Relevant to both Procurement and Legal relationships, understand what experience your prospective company has with bringing on new innovation - some companies have separate procurement processes to fast track new technology pilots, making it more feasible for all parties.

5. Site selection
As you design a pilot, you’ll want to focus on the long-term physical risks and financial implications of potential sites – whether that’s being within a regulated electricity market, or situated in a high-stress water basin. Highlight the impacts on their production capacity and operating costs that could occur if the site becomes unable to function. Try to prioritize learning about the considerations included in their current site selection or real estate management and align your selection process accordingly. Don’t try to convince them that sustainability is more important than traditional site selection factors like logistics and cost – show how it complements them by giving a fuller picture of risk. 

6. Operations
Operations teams want to see solutions that minimize operational complexity while maximizing efficiency – in other words, solutions that will make their jobs easier. Lead with the tangible value of your solution, whether that’s lowering energy bills by cutting consumption, or freeing up staff from time-consuming tasks that don’t generate revenue. Show awareness of, and curiosity in, their day-to-day realities to gain credibility - they’re often sold solutions that promise to make their life easier, that don’t in reality.

An effective strategy is to suggest rolling out your solution as part of an operational upgrade to minimize disruption. It’s also a good idea to get these teams’ opinions early in the evaluation process to uncover any externalities you might have missed that should inform the design of any pilot or contract relationship.

How and when decisions are made

As well as knowing who your audience is and what they care about, you’ll need to understand when the timing will be right. No matter how great a match your product is for the buyer, if you don’t know the cadence of their key decision-making forums and plan your moves accordingly, your proposal will be left to collect dust. 

You’ll also need to be versed in their key criteria when making these decisions, which will typically be categorized in three buckets: financial impact, sustainability impact, and operational feasibility. Key questions are likely to include:

• The impact on supply chain or ecosystem resilience or the business’s Scope 1, 2, or 3 emissions
• When the project will be operational, what stakeholders need to be involved pre and post decision-making 
• Your track record, references, and partners for de-risking taking a chance on your new solution
• Whether your pricing is in line with market trends
• What the payback period and returns will be

Scaling successfully

Once the partnership is underway, you’ll need to use clear metrics to show corporate buyers the financial returns and environmental impact of your solution on an ongoing basis. These will include the total cost (including OPEX, CAPEX, and other ongoing costs), the total benefits (such as savings or revenue lift), and reductions in emissions. These should be presented alongside your initial projections to show how you’re meeting or exceeding your earlier expectations. If the initial results are promising, you’ll want to be prepared to quickly scale from a pilot to a long-term partnership.

Erin Baldini is the Head of Corporate Strategy at Earth Finance. Erin’s experience  across industries focuses on decoupling business growth and negative environmental/social impacts by driving collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches. Erin has end-to-end experience developing social and environmental impact strategies, defining activation plans and implementing governance models to achieve shared outcomes in complex organizations. Leveraging human-centered design methods, she partners closely with clients to co-create solutions, engage cross-functional stakeholders and develop compelling narratives to build buy-in.  

Kat Hunt is the Head of Finance Strategy at Earth Finance.  Leveraging her sustainability and financial expertise, her experience concentrates on helping corporate clients achieve decarbonization strategies and climate technology firms achieve strategic operational growth. By working at the intersection of emerging technologies and established companies, Kat focuses on finding the collaborative and efficient path to a lasting climate transition. Prior to joining Earth Finance, Kat ran an advisory practice, Nadair, where she advised and ran strategic growth and operations across software and hardware climate technology startups.