Lesson 1: Perfecting the pitch — the art of making industrial buyers care

Welcome to our new article series, designed to help founders building breakthrough manufacturing software solutions nail the key challenge of GTM.

Here, 30+ top founders and operators share key learnings from building companies like Aris Machina, Makersite, Carbon Re, Agilox, Apple, Northvolt, and ProGlove, to help early-stage manufacturing software startups position themselves to meet the urgency, opportunity and moment to unlock Europe’s clean industrial era.

Because there is no time to lose.

And where better to kick it off than with the first job of sales: understanding your buyer’s critical need, and framing your solution as the best on the planet to solve it.

From scouring board reports to identify crucial customer KPIs, to serving up tangible early wins, here’s how to make every conversation count.

TLDR: The Key Messaging Cheat-Sheet For Buyers

Learning to speak the language of your buyer is critical in any business. Your product can be brilliant. And your metrics can be bulletproof.

But if the buyer doesn’t feel the pain you solve, you will be invisible.

Perfecting the pitch is about positioning your product in their world. Here, operators and founders share tactics from the field.

1. Focus on solving one concrete but high-value problem, fast

If your product has a long value-recognition cycle, carve out at least one module of the product that can show value fast, even if it’s not the longer term vision.

Matthias auf der Mauer, cofounder of Juna.ai and previously AiSight, stresses the importance of building expertise and becoming the go-to contact for operators as a first step in trust-building:

“Start with one niche problem and get insanely good at it. Prove your value on a single piece of equipment, then grow from line to line, factory to factory.”

Niche wedge beats platform vision (at first)

• Short time-to-value is critical
• Expand stepwise: one machine → one line → one site → full enterprise
• Avoid pitching a full replacement of entrenched systems (like MES)

→ FOUNDER TIP: Playbook case studies matter. Show results from companies like them — not just logos, but use cases with metrics.

“Alleviating pain is much better… you need to have a sense of urgency.” — Thibaud Martin, Founder of Altrove, working with Fortune 500 companies to deliver alternatives to their critical materials at scale.

2. Ground your ROI story in metrics familiar to customers

Rather than trying to re-educate the customer on why they should care about a new metric, the fastest way to win trust, attention, and budget is to directly improve the KPIs they already obsess over.

Focus on immediate, tangible benefits framed in those familiar priorities instead of a long list of features.

The fastest way to identify that KPI for the company you’re targeting? Check out their board reports, advises Josh Vernon, CEO of Carbon Re. The information is often hiding in plain sight.

Talk about your product in the way your customer talks about their business. Learn their workflows, acronyms and pain points, and use them to frame your value proposition. Then, iterate for the next customer in that segment.

→ FOUNDER TIP: Create an ROI one-pager that’s easily shareable internally. Email forwarding scales faster than talking. Give your internal champions the tools they need to easily broadcast your value.

3. Find the right abstraction level: confused buyers = slow sales

Sell industrials the tool, and VCs the vision: VCs want a moonshot; customers want a clear scope, quick ROI, and zero disruption. Don’t confuse the two pitches!

The customer pitch should be grounded in clear, rapid benefits, both for their operation, and, ideally, the person on the other side of the table.

Abstract narratives like “AI future of factories” don’t resonate with buyers, as Sid Khullar, Aris Machina co-founder explains. Focus on hard operational outcomes.

To achieve resonance, keep your sales pitch grounded in ground truths and achievable results. This will set realistic expectations about ROI, enabling you and your internal champions to over-deliver and speed up the sales cycle.

Ultimately, outcomes > tech specs: Customers care about uptime, safety, and efficiency, not your AI, IoT, or ML.

As one corporate buyer put it: 99.99% of customers don’t buy IoT solutions, they buy results.

“Our product was quite complex, but everyone said, ‘that’s a no-brainer’ — because of the storytelling.” — Alex Grots, founder of industrial wearables company Proglove.

When it comes to winning customers, simplicity in storytelling outweighs technical complexity. What sticks is what’s easy to understand.

Avoid over-indexing on the technicalities and prioritise narrative clarity instead.

4. Sticks work better than carrots

Solutions that mitigate immediate regulatory, safety, or supply chain risks have far higher urgency than those promising future upside.

• Risk-mitigation framing: Map external events (e.g., new regulations, competitors moving into a customers’ segment, high profile accidents) that create urgency and frame your offer as pain avoidance, not optional improvement.
• Macro cycles impact which pain points matter. For example, in growth markets (e.g., 2018–2022), marginal throughput improvement might have been enough to open doors. Today significant energy savings and yield become much more important.

→ FOUNDER TIP: Ultimately, you must convey the cost of inaction. The biggest enemy to sales is buyers doing nothing.

5. Know your audience

And finally: Obvious, but: know who you’re talking to. While it’s important to keep the key message a “no-brainer”, audiences respond best to tailored framing of key messages within a sliding scale of technicality.

It’s also important to understand the incentives of your targets. Plant Managers are often competing within a network, they are looking for a quick path to operational improvements that make them stand out amongst peers. C-Suite executives are more concerned with avoiding risk and maintaining long-term business continuity, they’re unlikely to respond well to a high-risk, high-reward idea (more on winning C-levels in our next chapter).

Technical and industrial founders can build rapport quickly, and position themselves as sparring partners, meeting customers at their level and paving the way to building trust and relationships.

→ FOUNDER TIP: Having a founder with industrial experience enables you to stand out against competing software vendors, who rarely understand customers’ business so deeply. Leverage this advantage if you have it!

Next stop: Navigating the manufacturing org chart

So, now you have the tools you need to craft a perfect pitch and open the door, which door should you knock on first? Stay tuned for the next chapter where we break down the typical manufacturing org chart and share top learnings on how you master internal politics to close your deal. DIVE IN →

You are reading our Manufacturing Software GTM Founder Guide for early-stage b2b manufacturing Saas founders. Read our intro here. With thanks to Sid Khullar (Aris Machina), Maximilian von Düring (AiSight), Alex Grots (Proglove), Yohann Rousselet (BAC), Sabine Erlinhager (Siemens Grid), Matthias auf der Mauer (Juna.ai), Thibaud Martin (Altrove), Omar Fergani and Josh Vernon (Carbon Re).

Authors: Kim Dang, Jess Burley, Christoph Gras, Sam Baker.

About us

Planet A is an early-stage European tech VC backing founders solving the world’s greatest systemic challenges. We use rigorous scientific impact assessments to identify solutions the world cannot afford to ignore. Investments include Carbon re, Aris Machina, AUAR, INERATEC, Makersite, C1, HIVED, traceless materials and 44.01. Follow us on LinkedIn!