The Multi-Stakeholder Sales Motion: How Customize Navigates Enterprise Deals Across Technical and Financial Decision Makers
Enterprise sales rarely succeed through a single champion. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Customize founder Stoyan Zulyamski shared how they’ve built a sales motion that addresses the distinct needs of technical, financial, and procurement stakeholders in large organizations.
Their approach evolved from early experiences selling cloud cost management solutions. “I speak to the financial people for several reasons,” Stoyan explained. “Finance and procurement are two very important teams because procurement talks to the cloud provider and they’re walking the commitment with the clouds.”
But financial stakeholders are just one piece of the puzzle. The technical side proves equally crucial: “First of all, the CTO and the vice president of engineering… because these people are analyzing how costumes will be plugged into their ecosystem and help them.” These technical leaders often have cloud budgets to manage while also being concerned with implementation and integration.
This multi-stakeholder reality becomes even more complex when selling through managed service providers (MSPs). “That’s a fairly complex approach there because you need to speak to the guys who are managing the, because they typically have a lot of cloud clients, to the guys who are managing that group of clients, the guys who are organizing billing, to the guys who are organizing offering,” Stoyan shared.
Their solution? Develop distinct but complementary value propositions for each stakeholder group. For finance teams, they focus on efficiency metrics: “Finance. They’re willing to understand, for instance, what’s the productivity for from the cloud, how they can save money.” For technical teams, the conversation centers on integration and automation capabilities.
The company has also adapted their go-to-market strategy to align with enterprise buying patterns. “Before were offering ourselves outside, but because customers are having commitments to these cloud providers, it’s easier for you to grow when you’re on the marketplace,” Stoyan explained. This shift recognizes how enterprise procurement teams prefer to leverage existing vendor relationships.
Their positioning has evolved similarly. Instead of leading with cost savings, they now frame conversations around organizational efficiency. “Telling them that organizing their processes leading to efficiency would be a better statement than just saying that one product will give you 30% savings,” Stoyan noted. This broader positioning resonates across stakeholder groups.
Education plays a crucial role in their sales process. “I think I spent most of my time educating customers why this is important,” Stoyan shared. This educational approach helps build consensus across different stakeholders by establishing a shared understanding of the problem and solution.
Looking ahead, they’re positioning for even more complex stakeholder dynamics as AI workloads enter the picture. “Bear in mind that the hyper automation era which we are getting into, we require from every software to act as a digital agent worker, which executes different tasks and can be leveraged as part of other larger ecosystem,” Stoyan explained.
For B2B founders navigating enterprise sales, Customize’s experience offers valuable lessons. Success requires more than just identifying decision makers—it demands understanding how different stakeholders evaluate and purchase technology, then crafting a sales motion that addresses their distinct needs while building toward a unified buying decision.
The key insight? Enterprise sales isn’t about convincing a single decision maker—it’s about orchestrating agreement across a network of stakeholders, each with their own priorities and constraints. The most successful sales motions acknowledge and address this complexity rather than trying to simplify it away.
Customize Navigates Enterprise Deals Across Technical and Financial Decision Makers
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