Breaking Silos: How to Understand the Invisible Stakeholders
In the first three parts of this series, we identified customer pain, built a compelling vision and highlighted the execution hurdles in Customer Success. But even if you get everything right, there is a silent killer waiting for every deal: invisible silos.
On our podcast, Dr. Jens Erasmus painted a picture that many software vendors dangerously underestimate. He was not just talking about internal vendor silos between Sales and Customer Success, but about the deeply complex stakeholder landscape inside an enterprise. If you believe you are selling "one solution to one problem", you have already lost. In reality, you are solving five different problems for five different departments.
The Illusion of the Single Decision-Maker
"There is no single decision-maker," Jens explains. In B2B environments, especially across enterprise industries, we deal with a complex buying center. Sales teams often fixate on IT procurement or the budget owner. Yet the true value of software is frequently decided in departments that are not even present during the initial discovery call.
Jens illustrates this with an example from the semiconductor crisis:
Procurement wants supply security.
Logistics wants to reduce warehouse footprint and holding costs.
R&D wants to avoid wasting critical engineering hours on emergency redesigns.
Sales needs to know which products they can realistically commit to end customers.
Extend Your Antennas: Finding Hidden Value
The mistake many sellers make is scanning prospects against a rigid, pre-defined template. Jens calls this a total head-scratcher. He frequently sees stakeholders drop valuable hints during conversations — such as warehouse space being extremely scarce and expensive — only for the software vendor to completely ignore the signal.
"I really do not understand why people do not keep their antennas extended," Jens notes. When a Head of Logistics mentions space constraints, software cost becomes secondary. If you prove that your solution eliminates the need to build a new 10-million-euro warehouse through smarter planning, a 100,000-euro license fee is an absolute no-brainer.
First, however, you have to listen and understand the logistical silo.
The "Sleep Argument": The Psychology of Plant Managers
Another example from Jens demonstrates how deeply you must immerse yourself in operational reality. A software vendor wanted to sell digital work instructions for manufacturing and was pitching the Quality Department. Jens advised them to talk directly to the plant managers instead.
Why? Plant managers have slept with their mobile phones on their nightstands for 30 years. The unbeatable argument for the software was not "better documentation", but: "Your phone will no longer ring at 4 AM because someone missed a maintenance interval."
That is value that breaks through silos. That is speaking the language of people, not machines.
Overcoming Silo Mentality in Sales
To succeed, vendors must connect the dots between various customer departments:
Stakeholder Mapping: Identify who is affected, even if they are not sitting in the room.
Hypothesis-Based Questioning: "We have learned from similar clients that logistics often struggles with X. Is that a challenge for your team as well?"
Cross-Silo Storytelling: Do not just talk efficiency to the CFO. Show them how you give plant managers their sleep back and return innovation capacity to R&D.
Become a Bridge Builder
Breaking down silos means extending your antennas and having the courage to step off the standard sales script. When you understand how the individual gears inside an enterprise mesh together, you stop selling software — you start selling company-wide transformation.
In the next article of our series: From promises to hard currency: How do we bridge the gap from sales pitch to actual P&L impact? We take a close look at Value Realization and our end-to-end methodology.
