In three recent conversations with renewable technology businesses, the same need has surfaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A customer pilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One reference site. One installation running in the field and generating operating data. After that, the conversation with the next customer becomes much easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All three businesses could explain why they needed the pilot. The harder question was why the customer should want one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Any renewable energy market entry strategy that depends on securing pilot projects has to confront an awkward asymmetry. Almost everything the pilot produces, operating data, credibility, a named reference and evidence for the next funding round, belongs to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost everything it costs belongs to the host.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reasons are entirely legitimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Laboratory and prototype performance will not satisfy a technical buyer. You need evidence of performance under real operating conditions, on a real site, through a representative range of weather, load and use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You need a customer who will take a reference call. Investors and future customers want evidence from deployments rather than demonstrations. Each completed installation reduces the perceived risk of the one that follows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of that is unreasonable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is simply a list of things you need. It is not yet a reason for anybody else to act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Consider the same proposal from the other side of the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hosting a pilot means site access, engineering time, a safety case, insurance and procurement checks, and possibly planning or permitting. It requires monitoring arrangements and creates a series of meetings that were not in anyone\u2019s plan for the quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It may mean interrupting an asset whose entire purpose is to keep running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most importantly, somebody inside the customer organisation has to put their name to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the installation underperforms, damages something or simply becomes a nuisance, that person owns the consequences. If it works, they have helped an unfamiliar supplier gather data and establish credibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pilot programmes exist because real-world testing genuinely matters. But the company hosting one still needs a compelling reason to accept the work and risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe would like to prove our technology\u201d is not one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLet us install a unit on one of your sites so we can prove it works\u201d is a supplier centred proposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It asks the customer to underwrite your product development with their operational risk, engineering resources and internal reputation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prospects rarely say this out loud. They say the technology sounds interesting. They explain that the timing is difficult. They promise to raise it internally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then nothing happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A stalled pilot pipeline usually looks like politeness followed by silence, which is why it can take so long to diagnose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Free does not fix it either. Removing the price does not remove the operational work or risk. It may simply reinforce the impression that the main beneficiary of the pilot is you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A customer agrees when the pilot tests a reduction in a problem they already recognise and to which they can attach a cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That problem is usually specific and unglamorous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Energy costs at a particular site. Exposure to outages where downtime carries a quantified penalty. Diesel logistics and refuelling in a remote location. A grid connection that is delayed, constrained or expensive to upgrade. A compliance deadline with a date attached to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The shift is in what the pilot is intended to test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not \u201cdoes this technology work?\u201d but \u201cdoes this reduce the cost or risk we already have by an amount worth acting on?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The subject of the sentence changes from your product to their operation. The internal sponsor now has something to argue for rather than something to permit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is also why application prioritisation may matter more than territory. The same technology can be irrelevant on one site and urgent on another two hundred miles away because the underlying problem is different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Six things should be settled in writing before anybody visits the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A named owner and a budget line.<\/strong> Somebody who owns the problem, not simply somebody who is curious about the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A quantified baseline.<\/strong> What the site currently spends, loses or risks. Without this, no result can be judged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Success measures defined in advance.<\/strong> Agreed by both parties before installation. Measures chosen afterwards are always open to dispute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A timeframe.<\/strong> Including what happens if the results are inconclusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A price.<\/strong> Who pays for what during the pilot, and what the unit and associated service would cost at rollout. Willingness to pay is easier to establish here than in a later conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rollout decision.<\/strong> If the agreed measures are achieved, what happens next, who approves it and by when?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A pilot with no agreed commercial consequence is a research project with a customer\u2019s address on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you cannot find a site willing to host a pilot on those terms, that is not necessarily a shortfall in sales activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The usual instinct is to widen the prospect list and send more emails. The more useful response is to treat the refusal as a finding about the proposition, the target customer or the application.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem you are addressing may not be expensive enough to justify the disruption. You may be speaking to people who do not own the problem or the budget. The application may be wrong when another use of the same technology would clear the threshold much more easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A renewable energy market entry strategy is not simply a plan for reaching customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a decision about which problem, on which type of site, is sufficiently painful that somebody will accept the work of testing your answer to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your technology needs a pilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether your customer does is the question that determines whether you have a market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In three recent conversations with renewable technology businesses, the same need has surfaced. A customer pilot. One reference site. One installation running in the field and generating operating data. After that, the conversation with the next customer becomes much easier. All three businesses could explain why they needed the pilot. The harder question was why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-market-entry","category-renewable-energy"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":7}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":532,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530\/revisions\/532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lsadvisory.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The commercial test<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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