The Geminus Guide to Complex Sales: How to Navigate 12-Stakeholder Enterprise Deals

Selling enterprise software is complex enough. Now imagine selling AI that will control million-dollar industrial equipment to a dozen skeptical stakeholders. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Geminus founder Greg Fallon shared their blueprint for navigating these high-stakes deals.

Understanding the Stakeholder Landscape

“We may have twelve stakeholders in a given deal,” Greg explains, “and it may be a split decision between, like, a chief digital officer who becomes our advocate, but then the operating teams that run these big assets who actually have to buy in and sometimes fund them.”

This dynamic creates a unique challenge: even with strong executive support, implementation teams can derail deals if they don’t trust the technology.

Finding the Right Entry Point

Rather than trying to sell to everyone at once, Geminus focuses on finding organizations with the right internal dynamics. Greg notes they look for “a certain subset of companies that have very strong relationships between their chief digital officer, their digital transformation teams and their operating units.”

This focus on organizational alignment has become a key part of their ideal customer profile. Instead of trying to force collaboration between siloed teams, they target companies where these relationships already exist.

Building Technical Credibility

Geminus tackles the credibility challenge through strategic partnerships. “We have found [it] helpful to identify credible companies to whom we can add value as a partner, who can bring us credibility to their customers who might be these large corporations,” Greg shares.

These partnerships, like their relationship with SLB (formerly Schlumberger), provide crucial technical validation that helps convince skeptical engineering teams.

Targeting the Right Organizations

To identify promising opportunities at scale, Geminus employs sophisticated tools. Greg explains they use “really sophisticated tools that are available now to help target customers and really understand which customers are more likely to resonate with.” Tools like 6sense help them analyze “what are their employees searching on? What keywords are they looking at? How do they stack rank?”

This data-driven approach helps them identify companies where multiple stakeholders are already investigating AI solutions, indicating internal alignment around innovation initiatives.

Framing the Innovation

Rather than positioning themselves as completely new and different, Geminus frames their innovation within familiar contexts. “I used to think that we’re creating a new category,” Greg shares, “and I’ve come to realize that there are a set of tools that have been around for about 40 years that kind of call themselves industrial optimization… I would say that we’re redefining a category, and I liken ourselves to the iPod.”

This approach helps different stakeholders understand the value proposition in terms relevant to their roles – whether that’s operational efficiency, cost savings, or innovation leadership.

Building Multi-Level Support

The key to managing multiple stakeholders is creating advocates at different levels of the organization. Greg’s team does this by crafting a compelling narrative around sustainability and efficiency. He notes that “the UN most recent climate report said that if the machines that are out there just improved their efficiency to the best they had ever done, not the best they can do, you would reduce global greenhouse gases by, like, 12%.”

This kind of message resonates with both executive leadership focused on sustainability goals and operations teams looking to improve performance.

For B2B founders navigating complex enterprise sales, Geminus’s experience offers valuable lessons. Success requires more than just superior technology or executive relationships – it demands a strategic approach to building trust and alignment across multiple organizational layers.

The goal is creating a coalition of supporters who can champion your solution. As Greg’s vision suggests, the rewards can be substantial: “My vision for the next three to five years is to have AI helping to optimize every machine, plant and system on the planet.” By carefully managing these complex stakeholder relationships, Geminus is steadily working toward making that vision a reality.