Welcome to the third edition of our newsletter (as always the previous ones can be found here).

We are not going to write extensively about Sigfox Connect, either you were there or we pity you for not coming. :)Thanks a lot to all in the Sigfox team to arrange smoothly such a wonderful event.

We still believe strongly in chairs monitoring, (we have expanded use case incl. ROI, TCO) Although today we want to talk about IoT sales.

I have been in the field for 4 years with hundreds of customers and done hundreds of PoCs. To a very small result.

What has been the reason?

I strongly believe that the reason is not the technology, because it works fine and reliably, as the only one of all the alternatives. It is not the Sigfox connectivity pricing. (Yes it is rather screwed up, but even Microsoft sells with over-complicated pricing). It is not the coverage as it is pretty dense in most of the countries and can be easily densified and supported through the new Sigfox Micro Base Station.

There are two main reasons for not closing real big size deals:

Not cheap enough, reliable, long-lasting simple smart IoT devices with excellent radio performance (that’s something we try to fix in SimpleHW and support Sigfox this way). Especially as the only way forward to make the numbers is the B2B2C market approach.

Far more surprising, is the fact, that we totally lack the methodology on how to sell IoT and how to close the deals.

We have concentrated so much on the coolness, possibilities, innovativeness, technology, and competition that in the end, we forgot to sell.

We forget to do the proper lead qualification, opportunity discovery, and PoC preparation. This led to incredible gadgetry, unfulfilled expectations, PoCs with no closed follow-up deals and waste of energy, time and money. We have been telling stories (which is good),  but we have totally forgotten to clearly define and discover the opportunity and prepare PoCs with critical details. In order to speed up the sales, we dare to bring to you a Checklist for qualification, Discovery, and Verification of opportunities.

In short:

• Talk about money early. Start with money. If the customer freaks out forget about him

• Do a detailed discovery: 80% is preparation and 20% execution

• Don’t do PoC unless customer commits to what will follow, decides the reasons behind PoC and clearly defines quantifiable criteria for the evaluation of the PoC

The checklist helps us to substantially to find and provide the best device, firmware, and platform combination in a speedy and efficient way.

Please let’s discuss it at Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook social media networks.