How I Reframed a Commoditized Category Around Business Value

The truth about my last position:

I didn’t walk into a “hot” category.

I walked into a legacy, commoditized one — the kind where most buyers think they already know what you do, what you cost, and why you’re interchangeable.

So the first move wasn’t a new pitch.

It was changing the persona we were selling to.

Before I showed up, the motion lived almost entirely in procurement. And when you live in procurement, you get treated like a line item: quote requests, price pressure, and “we’ll compare you to three others.”

The problem is… procurement doesn’t wake up thinking about growth, culture, brand trust, or employee experience. They wake up thinking about risk, process, and cost.

Which is fine — unless you’re trying to create strategic value.

So my BD/GTM play became:

Change the room

Get out of the spreadsheet conversation and into the rooms where problems are actually defined — marketing, people/HR, and executive stakeholders who own outcomes, not just purchasing.

Reframe the category so execs see it as a business lever

Not “a vendor purchase,” but something tied to priorities executives already carry: growth, risk, brand trust, internal adoption, and operational consistency.

Translate value into CFO/CMO logic

For CFOs: predictability, governance, cost of fragmentation, risk controls.

For CMOs/People leaders: brand consistency at scale, speed, experience quality, and the ability to execute without drama.

Make it safe to say “yes”

Especially in regulated environments, the biggest objection isn’t price — it’s “If this goes wrong, who owns the blast radius?”

So a big part of the motion was building confidence: guardrails, compliance thinking, escalation paths, and operational clarity.

That experience reinforced something I believe across any industry:

If you can change who takes the meeting, you can change what gets funded.