Heard Around The Grove
Blake Newcomer • April 13, 2026
Series alert! Here's episode 1 of a multi-part journey through GTM excellence in cleantech.
My good friend Eben Meyer runs Cleantech Growthlab, a small and focused team dedicated to helping B2B clean tech companies grow their businesses. Three years ago he left the larger corporate world of B2B industrial and enterprise software because he wanted something more impactful. What he built is a framework for thinking about why selling clean tech is structurally harder than selling in other industries.
Let's dive in.
In this week's issue
- Why CAC is structurally high in clean tech
- Buying signals hiding in plain sight
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CAC Is Structurally High in Clean Tech
Customer acquisition cost is not a clean tech problem. Every B2B company tracks it, but Eben makes a case that clean tech companies are fighting a structurally harder version of this battle. Understanding why is the first step to doing something about it.
Two ingredients:
- The first is product complexity. Clean tech often means hardware, software integration, and deployment inside critical infrastructure. We're selling into utilities, industrial facilities, and grid systems. The risk associated with something going wrong is on the scale of grid blackouts. That risk creates friction at every stage of the buying process: more due diligence, more stakeholders, longer cycles, lower conversion rates. You can have an excellent product and a sharp sales team and still watch deals stall for months because the buyer has to be certain in a way that a typical SaaS purchase simply does not require.
- The second ingredient is procurement cycle rigidity. In clean tech, policy and regulation shape when a buyer can buy. It does not matter how well you sell to a utility if they are not in a buying window. Eben's reminder: at any given moment, roughly 3% of your total addressable market is actually able to enter a buying motion. If your sales team is working the full 100%, they are spending 97% of their effort on people who cannot say yes right now regardless of what you say to them.
The implication is to focus outreach. Understanding who is in that 3% and why is where the leverage is. That is where the conversation goes next.
Buying Signals Hiding in Plain Sight
Are you feeling discouraged? Don't! The same regulatory environment that makes clean tech sales cycles long and rigid also makes buying intent more visible than in almost any other industry.
In standard B2B SaaS, intent data is largely inferred. For example, hiring patterns and page visit data are soft signals of a buying decision.
Eben's point is that clean tech companies have access to something much more concrete: public regulatory filings, rate cases, resource planning documents, emissions penalty disclosures. When a utility exceeds an emissions target and that penalty is filed publicly, that company has to act. Much clearer buying intent.
A skilled sales leader knows this intuitively. They have the relationships and the context to connect those dots without a system. The problem is that intuition does not scale. When a company tries to grow beyond that founding sales leader, the new team does not have the same context, and the conversion rates reflect it.
What Eben's team builds is the bridge between those two realities: taking the pattern recognition that lives in a great sales leader's head and turning it into observable, repeatable signals that a broader team can act on.
The practical path forward is to identify the signal archetypes for your specific product. The categories of events that, when they occur, typically precede a good sales conversation.
Next episodes talk about how to build this system. Let's do it!
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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