Selling to Innovation (if you have to).

The good, the bad and the ugly.

Let’s start with the bad.

Innovation teams are often new, so have limited power and budget. The will take meetings (sometimes too many), but rarely have serious budget. The nature of their forward looking thesis will often land you in R&D use cases.

They generally don’t know a ton about the business. Granted, they still know more than you, but not enough to surface and prioritize (willingness to pay) use cases, have access to data, or buy in from the user team.

The good:

Sometimes they have their own P&:L to test (de-risking the POC for a BU), so you can win a coveted logo and strap in for the long haul of contract conversion. Innovation’s experience working with startups could be a good bridge between BUs that don’t understand the technology. The act as an internal champion massaging feature requirements.

The ugly:

This is probably counter intuitive. But for early stage startups getting into too many POCs can actually be dangerous, especially if there are managed services involved. You can spread your delivery team thin and take away resources for better opps.

It’s fine to have a bunch of POCs, early on to fill out the logo slide, but if you can’t convert into production, you’ll have a problem fundraising.