Sustainability still matters

Jen Fietz

Guest Columnist

September 7, 2026

Sustainability isn’t new territory for manufacturers.

With ISO 14001 Environmental Management Systems certifications, Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) frameworks and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) disclosures, chances are your team has done the work and built a strong foundation.

That groundwork was built to prove compliance and manage risk.

But it may also create value that manufacturers aren’t fully capturing.

The question is whether your customers value that work enough for it to influence how they buy. 

Buyers across automotive, chemicals, machinery, building and construction, metals and packaging are actively screening suppliers on environmental standards because customers are demanding it.

According to McKinsey, sustainability technologies attracted $223.2 billion in equity investment in 2024, up from $176 billion in 2020.

This is not a passing trend – it signals a real shift in the market.

You don’t need the biggest sustainability budget to capture the value of this shift.

You need to connect sustainability to how you sell, position and grow, which will turn your groundwork into stronger margins and give you a bigger slice of the market.

Where sustainability starts to drive revenue

You invested in sustainability, yet it’s not driving margin – this is a common gap.

The value of your sustainability capabilities is real, but if that value doesn’t make it into the sales conversation, it doesn’t help you grow.

Think about it this way: a representative walks into a meeting and leads with “We’re ISO 14001-certified.”

The procurement team nods politely and asks what your price is per unit.

That certification has financial implications for the buyer, impacting the buyer’s own ESG reporting, the buyer’s supplier qualification process and what the buyer’s downstream customers are requiring of them.

If your sales team doesn’t connect those dots out loud or your marketing team doesn’t promote them, the value disappears.

The conversation defaults to price, and you’re back to defending margin instead of building it.

Research by McKinsey shows that 60-70% of U.S. consumers say they would pay more for products with sustainable packaging.

That pressure travels up the supply chain from the retail shelf to the retailers, distributors and manufacturers supplying them.

That means the buyers your team is talking to right now are already feeling that pressure from retailers and customers they serve.

The question is whether your commercial strategy is set up to seize that moment or whether your team is walking away from money on the table.

You don’t have to make any drastic moves.

Pick a place to start, whether that’s a product line, segment or account, and build the commercial case for scaling it.

A good example of this comes from the packaging sector.

Consider a packaging manufacturer whose customers are increasingly asking for more sustainable packaging options.

Its current product offering doesn’t meet that need.

Building an offering for that specific segment opens the door to new accounts and addressable parts of the market that were previously out of reach.

This isn’t a sustainability story – it’s a growth story where sustainability happens to be the catalyst that unlocked it.

The core idea is simple: when your operations teams can understand where your sustainability capabilities create real value for a specific buyer and your marketing and sales teams know how to bring that story to market, the path from investment to revenue becomes a lot clearer.

What it looks like when sustainability drives growth

The key to unlocking this growth is alignment.

When marketing, operations and sales are each working in silos without a shared sense of what success looks like, you end up with certifications that never make it into a sales conversation and green initiatives that live in the annual report instead of the revenue line.

A shared set of metrics helps turn strategy into action with one set of numbers that connects your sustainable product performance to account growth, retention and new market access:

• Which offerings are winning new business?
• Which credentials are getting you through procurement doors that used to be closed?
• Which value narratives are resonating with buyers?

If your team doesn’t have the answers to those questions, it’s hard to make strategic growth decisions, and this can keep sustainability in the “cost” column instead of the “growth” column.

A strong data backbone only matters if sales and marketing use it to make better decisions.

Evaluate current commercial sustainability approach

So, are you sitting on more commercial potential than you’re currently capturing?

If you are, that’s not a bad place to be because it means the heavy lifting is already done.

Here are eight ways you can evaluate where sustainability can create commercial value in your business, and every one of them can be started this quarter:

1. Start with one revenue stream. Pick a single product line or key account, build the commercial case and prove the model before you try to scale it. Small wins compound faster than broad rollouts.
2. Translate green capabilities into numbers that procurement trusts. Make sure your sales and marketing teams connect sustainability credentials to outcomes and procurement values, such as cost reduction, supplier qualification and downstream customer requirements. Environmental values rarely close deals, but financial outcomes do.
3. Build one shared scoreboard. Align sales, marketing and operations around the same definition of success. When everyone’s tracking different metrics, sustainability efforts disappear into the gaps between functions.
4. Set up a data backbone. Track which sustainable offerings are winning new accounts, expanding existing relationships and improving retention. Clean, shared data will turn green positioning from a talking point into a replicable growth lever.
5. Make sustainability part of your go-to-market story where it matters. A clear, consistent message about the value you create and why it matters now is more powerful than any certification alone.
6. Focus outbound on the right buyers. Not every customer weighs sustainability equally. Prioritize decision-makers who are already screening suppliers on environmental standards.
7. Build a measurement rhythm and protect it. Review sustainability-linked commercial metrics on a regular cadence, quarterly at minimum, with revenue outcomes as the lens. What gets measured gets funded.
8. Systemize what works and scale it. Once one revenue stream proves the model, replicate that system across product lines and markets. That’s how a project becomes a growth engine.

Lead sustainability like a business strategy

The point isn’t to turn sustainability into a marketing program – it’s to identify where the work you’ve already done creates value for your customers and to make sure your commercial strategy is built to capture it.

When you can demonstrate how sustainability creates value, it becomes more than an operational or ESG initiative.

It’s an advantage that can help protect margin, reach new buyers and compete for business you may be missing today.

For more, visit stokerga.com.