The Less Obvious Purpose of Pilots

As we all know, many companies conduct pilots to aid in making bigger decisions. They may ask you to help them pilot your solution. Or, they don't ask for a pilot license; they license what they need for their own process. But to them it is still a pilot.

The association of product management say, "The pilot project is an initial small-scale implementation that is used to prove the viability of?a project idea." And this is something we all recognize.

But there is another thing at play. For technology, customers are fundamentally asking three questions.

1. Is this category of technology worthy of investment to address our needs?
2. Does the product/service we are piloting meet the needs?
3. Do we want to continue working with the vendors and/or service providers we are engaged with for the pilot?

I think we as vendors sometimes focus only on the second question. We assume they want to work with us--because they chose us for the pilot. The category is secondary. If the pilot is successful, we win the business.

Not so fast. We looked at replacement decisions for purchases to support line-of-business initiatives . We asked respondents what was the original purchase method for solutions they replaced. The methods were not all mutually exclusive (e.g. you might start small and fully implement). But the top 2 original purchase methods were:

• 55% - "As a pilot project in our BU/department"
• 39% - "As a few (not more than five) discretely purchased user licenses in our BU/department"

Overwhelmingly, for these line of business buyers, they used the pilot or small deployment to validate the approach, but then changed products and vendors to drive the strategic initiative forward.

While I would never encourage any vendor to take their role in success of a pilot or initial deployment lightly, this research raises the stakes even higher. You need to help the client prove all three things in your favor:

1. That the category of investment makes sense
2. That your product can deliver value to achieve the bigger goals--success beyond the pilot.
3. That you will be a great partner in helping them achieve those bigger goals.

This requires the creation of (or contribution to) a pilot experience that delivers the short-term validation while helping set the long term vision. An experience that highlights not only product capabilities but helps to establish clear value goals and metrics for the future. An experience that doesn't just address the short term implementation, but lays out the longer term approach to drive adoption.

Evaluate pilots based on what the long term opportunity looks like so you can make the right resource commitments to create the best odds of you being the best long term partner.

It's not just about your product.

The articles in this newsletter do not follow Gartner's standard editorial review. All comments or opinions expressed here are mine and do not represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management.