How Climate Startups Can Get Traction In the Enterprise

Part 1 of the Coral guide to GTM execution

"If you have no revenue, you can say you’re pre-revenue... It’s not about how much you earn. It’s about what you’re worth. And who’s worth most? Companies that lose money," - Russ Hanneman

It will surprise many of our readers that team Coral does, in fact, have day-jobs. Chris spent many years as an early-stage sales leader across 5 startups in as many industries, and Nicole is an operations / data guru who has been an integral part of an iconic IPO, as well as raising obscene amounts of venture capital and the subsequent board management activities. 

Today, in keeping with our more tactical writing over the past few months, we’re going to put those hats firmly back on our heads, and dive into one of the most critical, under-discussed challenges in scaling climate-centric businesses; How do you get people to pay for the stuff you built?

Why?

We’ve written extensively about the challenges of raising capital for climate companies, and the misalignment of business models with the dilutive capital sources that underpin the vast majority of the US technology ecosystem. TL/dr; Climate companies have long feedback loops between demonstrative POC and commercial scale, often require more $ for physical-goods production, and their metrics tend to be very different from traditional tech. 

Capital is a tool, so raise VC if you need it and have access to do so. But, for most, we recommend getting clients to fund growth as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

A last note before we dive in; We’re writing this primarily for B2B / B2B2C GTM structures, playing with hardware, software and combinations thereof. While we imagine that much of the piece is applicable to direct-to-consumer companies, we’re not experts there and don’t pretend to be. 

There is so much to discuss here, so keep an eye out for follow-ups coming soon on mid-funnel deal execution, post-sale value creation, and hiring a sales team + transitioning off founder-led sales. 

Top of the Funnel; From “who?” to “we should find a way to work together.”

• Spend more time that you think you should on defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Create a series of specific statements; Ie, “We help {{titles A. B. C.}} at suppliers to the automotive and aviation industries decarbonize by reducing their usage of copper wire in exchange for our cutting-edge carbon nanotube material.” Shout-out to Coral-favorite Dexmat 🙂

  • Make 2-4 such thesis statements. Several will be wrong, but they give you the basis to run controlled tests. 

  • Try to phrase them in metrics. Ie “we anticipate clients being able to reduce their copper usage by X% within 3 years, leading to a cost savings of $Y.” Your projections here will be wrong, so make certain that they are conservative and defensible. 

• Create a list of perhaps 50 companies that match your ICP test above. Study every piece of content put out by the business, and their relevant senior executives in the past year. Look for documented, funded initiatives and bets where you can provide relevant value. 

  • It’s not impossible to sell into the enterprise and create an initiative and budget from nothing…. just very, very difficult. Much easier to find areas where your prospect already planned to spend money, craft a narrative about how you provide the most efficient solution to accomplish their goal, and grab the cash.

• Obsess over your prospect list. We recommend 3 tiers; 1. Perfect-ICP target accounts (ie, your first ~50 dream clients), 2. Interesting-but-imperfect (smaller, larger, or slightly different industry), 3. Experiments. 

  • Invest in a cheap CRM and data source (we like Hubspot). Create accounts and upload relevant contacts from a source like Zoominfo or Clay. Block a couple of hours a week to add contacts and email addresses. 

• Be everywhere. Run monthly webinars where you show off scientific progress and flashy new demos, and send invites to everyone in the industry. Get great at cold email. Go on every podcast that will have you. Give an exclusive interview to your favorite up-and-coming climate tech substack writers 😂. If you feel embarrassed at your own shamelessness, it’s a sign that you’re doing it right. 

  • This might be the most important point. We love working with climate tech founders because they’re altruistic, low-ego, mission-driven spotlight dodgers. These are wonderful qualities, until they’re not. Founders, if you want to change the world for the better, learn to love selling. It is ultimately the way to complete control of your destiny and impact. 

• The CEO sells. Related to the above, the CEO absolutely cannot delegate early sales conversations to anyone, even a cofounder. Climate tech is quirky and complicated, the sales cycles are long, and it’s absolutely vital to have the CEO’s clarity and vision in early conversations. Founders, you may hate this early on. You may also be terrible at it. Record the calls, get coaching and feedback from an experienced sales leader, and keep pushing. You will improve. 

• Coming out of the first meeting with interest and a scheduled next step, even if very far out, is a huge win. Treat it as such. Most enterprise deals are closed on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th round of conversations. It always takes longer than you think. 

• Sales is all in the followup. After each meeting, add everyone you spoke to into a tagged list and send them something of value every 30-45 days. What, I hear you ask… 

• Lean into complex science as differentiation. This is another point where we see climate founders missing the boat. Talk early and often about the years of laboratory work that went into development. Create light abstracts of academic papers and build them into marketing collateral. Do zoom tours of your R&D facilities. Get patents and do splashy press releases. Brag!

  • These are also your followup value-adds for the prospects you’re nurturing. 

• Post V1 pricing on your website. Make it very, very clear to the market that you’ve created something of value and do nothing for free. If you are reinventing an existing category (ie, most SaaS and industrial materials), then price relative to comparables. If you’re doing category creation, then look deeply into your unit economics, pick a number that makes the company viable at scale, then double it. We’re serious. There’s much value in forcing yourself to design a company and product that justifies premium pricing. 

• We’ll repeat, and louder. Get. Great. At. Cold. Email. 

  • The job of enterprise executives is to process information, delegate, triage, and remediate with their teams. They live in their inboxes. Accessing this real estate is a cornerstone skill. 

  • If you need help on crafting these messages, hit us up.

Wrapping up

Our hope with this piece is that you derive 1-3 new nuggets of wisdom or information to accelerate your progress. In the next few stops of this series, which are coming soon, we’ll dive into what to actually do with interest from enterprise buyers once you have them in process. 

Until then, give us feedback! We’d love to hear what you found resonant or helpful, what didn’t land, and please send us any questions that you’d like us to expand further. 

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