The three things standing in the way of corporate sustainability teams
Does your marketing speak to these common sustainability challenges?
Hello friends,
Sustainability professionals have it tough.
One wrong move and they may have the entire company’s reputation on their hands. Yet rarely are they given the resources they need to make change at an ambitious enough scale or quality.
They are given a little but accountable for a lot.
Climate tech marketers often focus on how their solution help companies achieve broader company goals, but it’s worth thinking about the day to day life of the overworked, under-resourced sustainability professional.
How can you help her do her job better?
Here, we’ll explore the three key blockers that stand in the way of sustainability teams taking action in 2024.
Does your positioning currently speaking to these challenges? Could do a better job at articulating the value proposition to help them solve these major challenges?
Challenge 1 — Where to focus
Prioritization is a skill few have truly mastered, but sustainability teams need it more than the average corporate team. Very often, these teams are starting from scratch or close to scratch. They’re constantly bombarded by new regulations, disclosure requirements, client expectations, board and investor pressure, supply chain concerns, plus your run-of-the-mill environmental scandal of the week.
There is far too much on the plate of what are often surprisingly small teams — it’s no wonder that it can be hard for climate tech companies to get face time with these team members.
We see three ways climate tech companies can consider the ‘focus’ problem when communicating with sustainability teams.
The first is the product itself — can it help teams get clarity on what matters? This is the case for many climate tech products, from carbon accounting to climate intelligence. If you can easily point these teams to the major hotspots to focus on, you’re already winning.
The second is in giving them back time to focus. If your solution takes care of manual work like research or data collection, framing it as a way to get time back for strategy can be highly effective.
The third doesn’t directly address the focus problem, but it does keep it in mind: get specific on the problem you solve. If nothing else, specific messaging helps your busy buyers easily categorize you and make sense of how and where they can make use of your product. Don’t sleep on specificity.
Challenge # 2 — Getting stakeholders on board
It’s clichéd to talk about the gap between climate ambition and action, but for sustainability professionals, this is a daily struggle. They are responsible for the sustainability performance of the entire organization, yet virtually everywhere they turn, they require others to actually push changes through.
It’s worth noting that sustainability professionals are typically not communications professionals or sales experts. Most aren’t naturals at pitching their ideas or getting the right people on their side. They need all the help they can get to craft a compelling story to get whoever it is — CEOs, CFOs, board members, department heads — on board.
So what can climate tech companies do? There are two main components here.
#1 — Understand the importance of stakeholders in the product adoption cycle. Often your marketing will need to address these stakeholders in order for your product to even be adopted by the company, so keep that in mind. We highly recommend creating content specifically calling out your various ICPs, like this guide from Persefoni.
#2 — Emphasize how your product helps sustainability teams engage stakeholders around their climate story. A significant portion of climate tech products actually do this, and many probably aren’t telling these stories as well as they could be. Maybe your product shares up-to-date data or gives actionable insights to board members and C-suite leaders, automates typically manual communications and engagements, or — for companies in the VCM — gives employees something to care about and marketing teams something to talk about. If you can link your product back to the critical relationships sustainability team members work so hard on, do it.
Challenge #3 — Fear of making the wrong move
Many sustainability teams are frozen in place while the fate of the VCM, the effect of legislation like the EU’s greenwashing rules, or regulations and guidelines (looking at you, SBTi) change or are put on hold.
Many have seen competitors — or even their own brands — scandalized for supporting low-quality carbon projects or making misleading claims about product impact.
This fear goes all the way to the top, creating a fear-based chain of command that makes bold new moves virtually impossible (especially when you combine environmental scandal with economic downturn).
So how can climate tech companies help sustainability teams (and their chain of command) move out of paralysis?
Trust is #1. It’s table stakes for climate tech. We’ve talked at length about the founding elements of trust, but the key for many companies will be putting themselves in the shoes of the buyer. How can you clearly explain how you remove risk (some degree of it) from the equation?
#2 is turning fear of action into fear of inaction. The sales process is far easier when buyers have already created their own urgency, but often there will be a push-pull when speaking to buyers: you can tell they want to take action, but the fear is palpable (speaking particularly of carbon markets here). The key is to check the boxes for building trust and then flip the conversation to the dangers of not using your solution or taking action. It’s not the kind of marketing tactic we like to lead with, but for bottom-of-funnel content focused on combating buyer objections, turning fear of action into fear of inaction can be a helpful tactic.
Takeaways
You don’t end up in a corporate sustainability role by accident. The people who work in sustainability teams care deeply about changing their company’s impact on the world. And yet at every turn, the barriers to action are significant.
That’s a frustrating position for a passionate person. B2B climate tech companies feel this pain too; virtually every barrier a sustainability team faces is also a barrier to adoption for their product.
Take a look at your content and messaging and ask yourself whether you’re addressing some of these common challenges for sustainability teams — not just so that you can get your own product over the line, but also so that you position your brand favorably with your target audience.
Rather than helping the company achieve their climate targets, you’re now helping a real person or people achieve their own goals, which, let’s face it — are far more motivating on a daily basis than a corporate mission statement.