A few years ago, the playbook was simpler: get to the Chief Sustainability Officer, make your case, and let them carry it through the organization. If you won the CSO, you usually won the deal.

That 2021 playbook is now actively hurting you.

I watched this happen recently with a client who runs BD at a climate tech company. She'd spent four months nurturing a target account. The CSO loved the solution. They had three calls, a demo, and a follow-up with the full sustainability team. Everyone was nodding. Then it went to procurement and finance, and the deal collapsed in two weeks.

Nobody outside that small sustainability team had ever heard of her company, and nobody had built the financial case the CFO needed to approve it.

The CSO was her champion but also the ceiling.

What changed

A few years ago, sustainability still lived mostly in one place. A small central team with a senior leader who owned the narrative and a fairly linear path from "they care about ESG" to "they'll buy what you're selling." The value proposition was about reporting, ratings, and reputation, and the CSO had the authority to drive a lot of it.

In 2026, sustainability touches finance, risk, operations, procurement, HR, and IT. But here's the part most sellers miss: the central sustainability team didn't grow to match.

A lot of CSOs are running multi-million dollar programs with three or four people, most of whom are buried in CSRD prep, supplier questionnaires, and investor disclosures.

Your CSO contact is real, but their authority over your specific solution is not what it used to be.

Who actually has to say yes now

There's usually a buying group of five or six people behind a won deal. Sure, the CSO is one voice in that room.

But the CFO also wants to know what changes in the numbers — cost of capital, audit risk, predictability of reporting. The COO wants to know if this makes operations harder or easier, and who owns implementation. Risk and legal want to know if it holds up under scrutiny. Procurement wants to know why you, why now, and what the alternatives looked like. IT wants to know how it connects to systems they already manage. Facilities want to know how their workload will change.

All of these people have a job to do. And if you haven't built a story for each of them before procurement opens the proposal, you may very well lose the deal you thought you'd already won.

What this changes about how you sell

First — stop treating the CSO as your buyer. Treat them as your guide and, on occasion, your champion.

The CSO knows who's actually going to scrutinize this deal. They know which VP in operations needs to be brought in early, which finance person will kill anything they didn't see in draft, which legal review takes six weeks if you don't pre-brief.

Ask them.

Most CSOs are relieved when a vendor stops pitching them and starts asking how to navigate their company.

Then build the case in their language, not yours.

Read that again.

The CFO doesn't need an ESG narrative. They need a financial one with sustainability woven in. The COO doesn't need a features list. They need to know whose calendar this lands on Monday morning.

Same solution, different story, every time. If you can only tell it one way, you're selling to one person in a room of six.

The signal to watch for

If your deals are stalling between "the CSO loves us" and "we're in procurement review," this is almost always why. The CSO opened the door. Nobody else in the building knew you were coming.

That's a fixable problem. But it starts with accepting that the title with "sustainability" in it isn't de facto the title with the budget.