Hey Grove readers! Have you spent time selling into electric utilities? two things:
- if so, respond to this email. we should do an episode together.
- if not, it's close to an 'impossible science' that The Grove is committed to demystifying.
This week, our podcast took a pause to put some resources into our Utility Innovation Summit happening in Philly next month. Get your tickets here!!
For this reason, we're throwing it back to some prime content about GTM in this space.
- Vik Chaudhry is co-founder and CTO of Buzz Solutions. Founder-led sales perspective.
- Eben Meyer from Cleantech GrowthLab. Systems operator perspective.
- Last but not least, Zainab Gilani; the energy and power analyst at Cleantech Group. She covers the market wide view of energy production + transport/delivery.
Let’s dive in.
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In this week's issue
- If you have the time to test and test and test
- Know What You're Selling Into
- Hardtech Returns
If you have the time to test and test and test
Vik Chaudhry grew up in New Delhi with 5 to 6 hours of power outages a day. In response, he started Buzz Solutions to make electric utilities more resilient.
Buzz officially launched in 2017. The concept was to use AI analysis of imagery to locate threats to utility assets.
At the beginning, Vik and his co-founder cold called as many Utilities as they could handle. They found that many companies had more imagery data than they could analyze and Buzz offered to help them do that. Only a handful agreed to share the data, but that's all Vik needed to train their model. This lasted 2 years.
By 2020, Buzz finally had an MVP they could demo to the utilities they cold called years earlier. The demo landed a handful of pilots. Again, all they needed to get to the next step.
Finally in 2021, when New York Power Authority put out an RFP for AI-enabled infrastructure inspection. 4 years of training & derisking their analysis model, this was the chance they were waiting for.
Out of 100+ vendors, their model achieved 85% accuracy against 32% for the nearest competitor. Their results came back in 7 minutes against a 30-minute window that everyone else exceeded.
This ~5 year process landed Buzz their anchor Utility customer.
Lesson: This stuff takes timeeee. No utility wants to be first (or second, third, fourth. They'll be the 9th, though!) Find the means to test and test and test your solution before approaching a utility for a full sale. They're looking for innovation, but needs to be sufficiently derisked before they'll budge.
Can't say it enough: Growth is a system
This is true whether we're talking electric utilities or not. Marketing feeds sales, sales feeds the executive layer, and the executive layer informs marketing.
Be precise with marketing. Eben has seen up to 62% of digital ad spend going to audiences that simply can't buy your product. For example, LinkedIn lets you target utilities, but doesn't distinguish between electric and water utilities.
To fix:
(a) build your own company list using AI and upload it directly.
(b) use negative targeting. Input the filters you don't want. Just as important as the ones you do
The sales stage is all about velocity. Eben has a cute knocking-on-doors analogy.
You want to show up announced and you want someone to be home. In other words, the account already knows who you are and they're in an active buying motion.
Use buying signals like regulatory deadlines, permit renewals, or operational stress events to trigger outreach.
Last, track everything cleanly. The goal is to gain enough clarity to ask better questions of the data, while creating a system that gets smarter over time and works in your favor.
Deeply understand the market you're building in
Zainab's whole thing is understanding markets deeply. The thing she identified as a leading driver is load. The grid was built for demand that was relatively stable/predictable and growing slowly. Data centers are changing that.
Single center demand is often measured in gigawatts. In the best-case scenario, hyperscalers become major customers for renewables and nuclear. In the near term, though, much of their growing power demand is being met by new fossil fuel infrastructure.
She's excited about things like smart transformers like those being built by DG Matrix, Veer's high-temperature superconducting materials, & sodium-ion batteries scaling rapidly in China. These technologies don't make crazy headlines, but they operate in materializing markets.
Her take is that the technology is mostly there. What lags is the financing, the regulation, and the market structure to let it deploy at the speed the demand is growing.
Electric utilities exist inside/with/on top of/outside of all this innovation. Considering impacts that they might not even be seeing helps you make the case for how you'll work with them.
Feedback
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With love, Blake
See you next week!
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