The pilot met every success criterion. Nine months later there’s still no contract.

Pilots that succeed technically and fail commercially usually share a single design flaw, and it is fixed before the pilot starts, not during it.

By Steve 5 min read
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A pilot is one of the few things in a sales process that feels like unambiguous progress. The buyer has said yes to something. Work is happening. There is a Slack channel, a weekly call, a named contact who is enthusiastic. Then the pilot ends, the report says it worked, and nothing happens, for a month, then a quarter, then indefinitely, until the sponsor changes role and the whole thing has to be built again from scratch. The instinct is to treat this as a follow-up problem: the pilot was…

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