Lesson 2: The Art of Industrial Selling
Navigating the industrial decision machine
In the first lesson we talked about how to frame your pitch. Here, we double down into even greater detail to break down the art of mastering internal politics: from the shop floor to the board room.
We focus on three key areas of the manufacturing org chart to help you:
- Secure your corporate sponsor (Getting exec buy-in unlocks budget, credibility and priority)
- Find your operator champion (Your end user: creates engagement, evidence and momentum)
- Navigate blockers (Know who has veto power and how to clear invisible organisational roadblocks)
Finally, we talk budget ownership: identifying the organisation’s true economic buyer.
This is the latest edition of 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.
Jump in to Lesson 2 as we share key field lessons on how to win over the internal stakeholders who cheerlead, green-light and minesweep your way to closing the deal.
Note: This chapter focuses on the realities of selling into large industrial enterprises. Selling to small medium businesses (SMBs)? Stay tuned for our chapter on that topic, coming up!
Start From The Top: Executive Buy-In
Get a corporate sponsor early. Engineering teams may love your product, but they can’t write big checks. Real budgets and decisions live at the executive level. Operators are important to bring along and get excited but they are not the only stakeholders needed to greenlight expansion.
To get executive attention, you need to solve an executive problem. Building on our theme from Lesson 1, the trick here is to frame your offer around strategic business priorities in the C-suite, not features or department-level pain. The higher the perceived business value, the stronger (and faster) the decision.
For example, let’s say you’re offering a smart fire extinguisher monitoring system.
- If you frame it as a facilities management improvement, it’s likely to be seen as a low-level operational concern, and delegated accordingly.
- But if you position it as part of a broader health and safety compliance strategy, tied to regulatory exposure or risk management, it becomes a C-level conversation.
It’s not just what your solution does, it’s how you frame the problem it solves. Attach yourself to executive-level priorities and the conversation stays at the top.
→ FOUNDER TIP: Prioritise Top-Level Engagement Over Content Marketing. Thought leadership, white papers, and blog posts aren’t what moves the needle in industrial sales. What works: niche events over big trade shows and generic conferences. Hosting targeted dinners, closed-door events, such as round tables, and strategic in-person conversations for high input, high ROI with executive-level stakeholders. If that feels overwhelming, consider teaming up with partners who share a complementary interest in your target group and can bring bigger budgets and brand credibility to the table.
Create Your Operator Champion
At the same time, you need to find the right internal champion. Often, your first contact is with the innovation team, but you need to identify a few operational advocates who are close to the “threshold of conversion” and work on building strong relationships with them.
So, what are you looking for? Two key factors matter when identifying the right operator champion to take your product forward:
- Seniority: Choose someone senior enough to unblock others, such as a senior Six Sigma Leader, Head of Quality, or Process Engineering Manager. When they understand and trust your product, the rest follow.
- Personal stakes: Your best champion is someone who sees your rollout as career-defining, as in, someone who gets promoted when your KPIs move. You’re looking for a leader who cares enough to fight for your product.
A “champion” really is a leader who believes in your product strongly enough to promote it amidst competing priorities. Even the best solution gets lost in the daily complexity of operations, that’s why it is critical you have an internal advocate who is excited enough to when everyone else is tempted to deprioritise it.
→ FOUNDER TIP: Avoid a single point of failure. People move around in and across companies. Avoid over-reliance on a single champion, especially one without budget authority, by building multiple champions in each layer, be it operations, IT, quality or procurement.
Identify and Work Around Potential Blockers
Internal blockers come in many forms, but not always the ones founders expect. Three common factors that slow down or kill sales are:
1. Low digitisation
2. External consultants
3. Inaction (far more than internal competitors).
The first two are often underestimated. The third is almost always misunderstood.
1. Check Digital Maturity Early
If your success depends on internal systems or infrastructure that are still years away, the deal is unlikely to land. No champion, no matter how senior, can overcome missing foundations.
Ask the difficult questions to identify this early and redirect effort to sites or business units that have the required sophistication instead of sinking time into those that can’t realistically adopt your product.
2. Don’t Overlook External Consultants
In large enterprise deals, consultants hired by big buyers often shape outcomes more than founders realise. They are brought in not only to advise but also to legitimise decisions. Even if your product is clearly superior, executives may hesitate without a consultant’s endorsement.
Know which firms influence your prospects and build those relationships early.
3. Internal Competitors Aren’t the Real Threat — Inaction Is
Founders frequently fixate on “internal competition” that is, worrying that a corporate team is building something similar. It may complicate the conversation, but enterprise buyers overwhelmingly report that this isn’t what kills deals. The real threat is far simpler: doing nothing.
Here’s why internal competitors aren’t as scary as they seem:
- Large companies routinely build and partner simultaneously. Volvo, for example, developed its own autonomous driving systems while partnering with Aurora to access a full suite of autonomy capabilities.
- Many internal solutions serve marketing narratives more than operational reality. Most large corporates, especially in Europe, simply do not have the strategic bandwidth to build competitive software in-house.
- For critical systems, incumbents are used to buying solutions. Internal tools are normally reserved for niche applications where nuances exist. For business critical and multifunctional systems, senior stakeholders will default to lower risk and outsourced liability over better usability and customisation.
And if you keep hearing that “we’re building this internally,” it may signal something else: You are speaking to the wrong stakeholder. If this continues to be a problem, you may need to revisit tip one from this chapter: Start from the top!
→ FOUNDER TIP: Before anything else, you must make the cost of doing nothing uncomfortably clear. Buyers default to inertia unless the pain of inaction outweighs the friction of adopting something new. The biggest enemy in enterprise sales is not a competing vendor, it is the customer doing nothing. Make the risks, costs, and missed opportunities of inaction visible, and repeatedly reinforce them throughout the sales process.
Where Budgets Live: Know Who Pays
Not all budgets are created equal. A stakeholder’s headline budget tells you much less than which part of the P&L they control and why that budget exists in the first place. Investigate what influences their budget and how much of the P&L they are responsible for.
The table below offers a guide to budget ownership, and contract authority in industrial organisations. Use it to map your stakeholders early and design your engagement strategy accordingly.
Budgets are circumstance dependent. Struggling plants often have less budget to fix their problems because they’re already financially constrained. On the other hand, at the right moment of audit cycles or compliance programmes, stakeholders like quality managers may have more budget.
Enterprise decision-making is inherently interconnected. It’s important to recognise that budget authority does not automatically translate into full decision-making power. Even stakeholders who control budgets often defer to strategic, financial, or technical leaders when shaping final decisions.
To reflect this reality, we mapped the “rings” of stakeholder influence shown below. This helps clarify how each stakeholder’s choices are shaped, directly or indirectly, by others in the organisation. Even C-level executives operate within a web of influence that includes shareholders, finance teams, and legal advisors.
Decision-making is rarely linear. It is a complex, interconnected process, and understanding these dynamics is essential for navigating it effectively.
→ FOUNDER TIP: Avoid the innovation budget trap. Innovation teams may test, but scaling requires buy-in from ops or execs. In larger organisations, each department might even have their own decentralised, innovation budget which founders could mistake for department budget.
Next Stop: Turn Success to Scale
Securing adoption in one plant is only step one. The next challenge is turning that early foothold into broad, multi-site expansion across the organisation. In the next chapter, we walk through the structure of a typical manufacturing enterprise and the strategies that allow founders to translate success in one plant into company-wide rollout. JUMP 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), Thibauld Martin (Altrove), Omar Fergani and Josh Vernon (Carbon Re).
Authors: Jess Burley, Kim Dang, 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!
