Years ago, when I was running my consulting firm, I spent six months working a Fortune 500 account because they were one of the first to announce a net zero target. I did quarterly check-ins. Sent useful content. Had two introductory calls that felt promising.

Then I finally got a candid moment with the sustainability director, who told me the target had been written by the comms team eighteen months earlier and nobody had been given a budget to deliver on it yet.

That was the moment I stopped trusting headline commitments.

Thousands of companies have net zero targets now. Roughly a third of listed companies, more than double what it was five years ago. The pledge has gone from differentiator to table stakes, which means a signal a lot of sales and BD teams still look for has lost most of its predictive value.

A pledge tells you sustainability has entered the conversation. It does not tell you there is a budget, a project, or a person on the hook.

Your job is to tell the difference. And most of the answer is sitting in public information you can read before you ever send the first email.

The pattern that fooled me

What I now call the hollow pledge looks like this from the outside: a glossy announcement, a one-page mention in the annual report, no new roles, no investor commentary, no movement in the org chart.

The company is signaling to stakeholders without the internal alignment to deliver.

If I'd known what to look for back then, I would have seen it. No sustainability lead had been hired. The annual report mentioned the target once and moved on. There were no job postings tied to it. No CapEx commentary. Nothing structural underneath the headline.

I was selling to an announcement.

What I do differently now

I read four layers of signals before any company makes it into my pipeline. Headline commitments are the top layer — and the weakest. Underneath sit structural moves, operational commitments, and resourcing signals, in that order.

When resourcing signals connect back to a headline commitment, you've found a budget. When they don't, you've found a press release with a hopeful target attached.

The hardest discipline is this: if you can't find a resourcing signal, the company isn't in your pipeline. They're on your watch list. There's a difference, and confusing the two is how BD teams burn quarters chasing accounts that were never going to close.

The commitment is the headline. The budget lives in the details. Your edge is reading the details before anyone else does.