Almost every founder I work with has a version of the same problem: the pilot succeeds, the engineers like the product, the operations team wants to expand it — and then the deal sits.
For three months. Six months. Twelve.
This is not a product problem. It is a process problem, and it is one of the most expensive things in early-stage utility-tech. A stalled deal burns runway twice: the cash you spend keeping the relationship warm, and the cash you don’t get because the contract isn’t signed.
Here is what is actually happening, and what to do about it.
The buyer is not who you think it is
When a utility runs a pilot, the people in the room are usually engineering, operations, and some innovation function. These are real buyers — but they are not procurement buyers. They cannot, on their own, write you a contract. The contract gets written by:
- Procurement, who needs your security review, your insurance certificates, your MSA terms, and (often) two competing bids on file
- Regulatory, who needs to know whether the spend is in-rate-base, going through a special program, or being capitalized
- Legal, who has opinions about indemnification, data ownership, and termination clauses
- Cybersecurity, who has its own checklist that did not show up in the pilot
If you have not engaged each of those functions during the pilot — not after — your pilot is going to “succeed” and then disappear into a procurement queue you cannot see. (This is exactly the gap our Pilot-to-PO Playbook engagement was built to close.)
The pilot is not the deal
A pilot proves the product. The deal is a different sale, with different buyers, different gates, and different timing.
The mistake is to treat the post-pilot conversion as a continuation of the pilot relationship. It is not. It is a procurement event, and procurement events follow rules:
- Capital-budget timing. Most utilities make capital decisions on annual cycles. Miss the window and the conversation moves to next year.
- Rate-case alignment. If the spend is large enough to require regulatory recovery, it has to fit a pending or upcoming rate case. That is a 12–24 month project.
- Bid requirements. Many utilities require competitive bids above certain thresholds. If you do not know your threshold, you do not know whether you are about to be asked to compete with two companies you have never heard of.
The fix is to start preparing for the procurement event at the same time you start the pilot. Not after.
What changes when you do this right
Founders who run their utility-tech motion this way move from a 18–24 month pilot-to-deployment timeline to something closer to 9–12 months. The product does not change. The team does not change. What changes is that the procurement conversation happens in parallel with the pilot, not after it.
When the pilot ends, the contract is ready to sign — because procurement, regulatory, and security have already done their work.
That is the gap we close. It is also why we built BMC. For more on how the seven utility buyer types differ in their procurement mechanics, see There is no ‘utility market.’ There are seven.
If your team is currently in the pilot-to-deployment gap and want to talk through what’s stuck, book a call.