Early Adopters

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Cherish the early adopters

In an emerging market, the customers who create budget for your solution are early adopters. They take the time to understand your technology, give you feedback to improve your solution, and are willing to buy it, despite its limited functionality and performance. It’s too bad there aren’t enough early adopters to sustain you and everyone else in the marketplace.

Start looking for customers who will free up budget for your solution

These are the customers for whom your solution has such compelling value, they can’t afford not to have it immediately. They are mining companies that require predictive maintenance, because a broken excavator means millions of dollars in lost revenue per day. They are fleet managers whose trucks can be dispatched proactively to anticipate customer needs and secure new pickups (and revenue) before the competition can react.

IoT and analytics are not sold into IT departments

Within your customer’s organization, IoT & Analytics is typically sold into one of the line of business functions. This could be operations, maintenance, marketing, sales, quality control. However it is NOT typically sold into the IT department. In fact most of IT does not like IoT as it introduces risk, instability and security concerns. So whilst IT is not the budget holder, they are influencers and can say NO. Hence we need to satisfy the concerns harbor by the organization’s IT department. We are also likely to need to use our IT contacts to get to the decision makers, who will free up and identify budgets to tackle the business issues they are facing.

Abel Smit
Sales Director
Data Solutions & IoT | Europe

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