Inside Veeve’s Multi-Stakeholder Sales Strategy: Crafting Different Pitches for Different Decision Makers
Enterprise sales rarely fail because of the product. They fail because you’re pitching the wrong value proposition to the wrong stakeholder. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Veeve founder Shariq Siddiqui revealed their sophisticated approach to navigating enterprise buying committees.
The Multi-Stakeholder Challenge In enterprise retail tech, the buyer isn’t always obvious. As Shariq explains: “Sometimes the buyer is the store operations. Sometimes the buyer is the chief digital officer. Sometimes the buyer is the chief data officer who’s looking for data.” Each stakeholder has different priorities and measures success differently.
The Tailored Pitch Strategy Rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach, Veeve creates customized pitches for each stakeholder. “I would literally have multiple different versions of our pitch deck for the same company, but depending on who I was talking to,” Shariq notes. “I don’t need to tell them what I’ve built. I need to tell them how I will solve their problem, not their counterparts problem.”
Finding Unexpected Champions This approach led to discovering champions in unexpected places. Shariq shares an example: “There was a leader from a very large corporation who was basically coming in, c level executive, after spending years building their pharmacy in their pharmacy department.” Rather than focusing solely on their core retail technology pitch, they adapted their solution to address pharmacy-specific challenges.
“We can make it so simple that when you enter and you check in on the cart, if you have a pharmacy order, we can send that information to the store pharmacy that this person is now in the store, and now you can digitally communicate with them.” This pharmacy-specific use case became their entry point with this executive.
Research-Driven Personalization The key to effective stakeholder targeting is thorough research. “You need to have a really good pulse in the domain that you are operating in and also being able to do research on them, like the articles that they posted, the medium or the LinkedIn, so you can understand what are these people passionate about,” Shariq explains.
Breaking Through Organizational Barriers When facing initial resistance, Veeve learned to keep searching for the right stakeholder: “Whoever you think is the right buyer may not be the right buyer. So you’re going to be knocking multiple doors within the same corporations to kind of figure out who is the right fit.”
Strategic Lessons for Technical Founders
- Vision vs. Problem Solving “You don’t want to sell the vision to retailers because they don’t really care about your company’s vision,” Shariq notes. “They care about their company’s vision. They care about their financials. They care about their customers.”
- Network Leverage When raising money, Shariq specifically targeted VCs with retail connections: “I purposely went after VCs who have previously invested in other retail startups and who’ve gained some traction and what their relationships are.”
- Persistence and Flexibility The approach requires both persistence and adaptability. When one stakeholder doesn’t respond, keep searching for others while adapting your pitch based on what you learn.
For technical founders selling to enterprises, the key insight is clear: success often depends less on your product’s capabilities and more on your ability to frame those capabilities in terms of each stakeholder’s specific challenges and objectives. Instead of perfecting a single pitch, focus on understanding the various stakeholders’ priorities and crafting targeted value propositions for each.
This approach requires more upfront work, but it dramatically increases your chances of finding a champion who can drive your solution through the organization’s approval process.