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3V Infrastructure: Why Stripping the Sustainability Pitch Unlocked Commercial Real Estate Sales

The leasing office conversation keeps happening. A prospective tenant asks about EV charging. There are no chargers. They leave. Property managers are reporting it up the chain in high EV adoption markets — the Bay Area, LA, Boston, Florida, Texas. The message is clear: no chargers means lost leases.

Ben Kanner heard this pattern enough times to build a company around it. But the way he sells that company is not what you’d expect from a founder who spent years in renewable energy finance. 3V Infrastructure finances and manages EV charging infrastructure for multifamily housing at scale. Ben’s pitch contains zero mention of sustainability.

“Whether you’re red or you’re blue or you’re purple or you’re pink,” Ben says, “it is really not about politics, it is not about climate, it is not about sustainability. For us, this is an amenity.”

That decision, made at founding, is the throughline for everything 3V does in the market.

In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, Ben shared how 3V built its GTM from a Rolodex and a financing thesis into a channel-driven enterprise motion — and why the company is now reworking its talk tracks after a mid-funnel stall.

The NOI Frame That Replaced the Green Pitch

Ben’s read was blunt: “None of this works unless there’s actually money behind it.” So 3V never pitched climate. They pitched cap rates.

The math is simple and Ben deploys it precisely: EV charging as an amenity attracts residents, which supports rent growth, which increases net operating income, which at a cap rate directly increases property value. “In real estate it’s very simple. You put a cap rate on NOI and that gives you more property value.”

This is a positioning decision that determines which internal stakeholders move a deal. Sustainability titles were getting cut across commercial real estate — a dynamic the interviewer raised and Ben confirmed shaped his thinking. The buyers controlling discretionary spend for revenue-generating amenities sat in a different part of the org entirely.

Finding the Buyer Nobody Was Pitching

Ben didn’t know the ancillary revenue director role existed before entering the commercial real estate space. Once he found it, those stakeholders became his best partners.

“Some of my best counterparts and my best partners are in the ancillary revenue departments because they do care about the things that we can help them with — which is generating more revenue for their properties.”

The lesson is about what happens when you map an enterprise org with the wrong value proposition in hand. Two companies can look identical in a CRM: same size, same geography, same asset class. “Two companies can look very similar on paper but they are structured differently, they care about different things.” One has a sustainability mandate and a shrinking budget to execute it. The other has an ancillary revenue director who needs to show NOI gains this quarter. Same product, completely different conversation.

Ben’s approach is to map every major account before assuming who the buyer is — checking for sustainability roles, ancillary revenue roles, asset managers, portfolio managers, and property managers — and identifying who will champion versus who will decide. “It’s great if those two people are the same, but usually they’re not.”

Building Distribution Without Building Headcount

3V is not a SaaS business, and Ben made peace with that early. “We are never going to be a hyperscale, especially in terms of people, type of business.” Given that constraint, the GTM had to be built around leverage.

The answer was channel partnerships: EPC contractors, hardware providers, software companies already embedded in commercial real estate accounts. These partners carry pre-existing trust that cold outreach doesn’t replicate. “They have pre-existing relationships… it helps push the deal through.”

Channel programs fail when founders treat partners as distribution pipes. Ben’s rule: squeezing partners on economics is how you inadvertently route deals away from yourself. If 3V takes too much margin, partners sell direct rather than bringing 3V in as the financial sponsor. “We can’t just beat them down on price because then they’re less likely to sell to us… you kind of got to leave some meat on the bone for everybody.”

This year’s target: 75% of leads from channel partners, 25% from self-originated sources including a small SDR function for targeted key account outreach. The SDR motion is not a replacement for channel. It’s designed for specific accounts that won’t come through partners organically — what Ben calls “spear fishing for specific types of key accounts.”

The Mid-Funnel Problem and the Pivot in Progress

3V did well the prior year. Then something shifted. Ben built a stage-by-stage funnel view and found volume stacking in the middle — deals entering but not converting.

“What was working for us last year doesn’t seem to be working for us right now.”

His diagnosis: declining multifamily rents — which Ben names explicitly — have put property owners in a different headspace. They’re managing more immediate problems. An upside pitch lands differently when an operator is focused on not losing ground. “Rents have been declining and especially in multifamily. And so they’re thinking about other stuff.”

The hypothesis Ben is testing: shift from profit-share potential to operational relief. “We want to lean into, hey, we’re the easy button. Forget about the financials, forget about making any profit share off of charging — we’ll come in and take this off your plate.”

The product hasn’t changed. The structural alignment — 3V only makes money when chargers run, so uptime is a shared incentive — hasn’t changed. What the buyer needs to hear to say yes has changed, and Ben is rebuilding the talk track around that reality.

What Founders Can Take From This

The through-line across 3V’s GTM is a discipline most founders resist: let the market tell you what it cares about, then meet it there — not once at launch, but continuously.

Ben stripped the sustainability pitch because money moves deals. He found ancillary revenue directors because they held the right incentives. He built channel because headcount math didn’t work. And now he’s revamping every talk track because a funnel diagnostic told him the market shifted.

The specific decisions matter less than the posture: build a view of your funnel, read what it’s telling you, and don’t defend last year’s playbook when this year’s data says otherwise.