What’s in an announcement?

It can be frustrating, can’t it? Knowing that there is a growing pipeline of companies wanting to work with Omnitude as a paying customer, or as a partner, but you can’t find out who they are?

But in order to engage the biggest and best businesses you have to follow a process, and rightly so.

I am going to spend some time in this article, talking about what is involved in finding, winning, onboarding and announcing companies with Omnitude. Simply put: why it’s not as easy as just an announcement.

All companies are different. This applies to both Omnitude and our prospective clients. The needs of the business in terms of requirements of a solution, procurement processes, legal obligation vary wildly between companies.

Below is a typical walk-through of the sales and onboarding process so that you can understand the complexities involved and help see the areas of risk. We are going to assume that we are already talking to the correct people in the process for simplicity.

Firstly the Company is identified as a prospective client/partner.

1. We make introductions — Making sure everyone is comfortable talking to each other and knowing who we are going to be discussing the relationship with
2. We then find if there is a real need for Omnitude — Ensuring we fully understand the company, its goals, objectives, hopes, fears and everything in between
3. We then re-group to determine if Omnitude can help. If we think we can help and we are the best solution for the company, we demonstrate existing platform capabilities to the prospect client/partner.
4. This will enable us to confirm there is an opportunity to work together, although yet to be defined. There can be a review process within this, and we may be required to repeat a demo for different stakeholders etc
5. If there is a verbal agreement, we sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to further confirm a working relationship, although this is not a financial agreement, many other companies use this as an announcement point. Here at Omnitude, we like to ensure we know where we are adding value before we announce. It’s more than just being a hype machine, its adding value to the business with the technology
6. We then send a proposal for a deeper discovery phase, discovery takes time to look at all the working parts of a system and project requirements
7. We then go to client approval — here we are usually locked into a non-disclosure clause
8. After approval we begin onboarding of the client — creating a project team, chemistry meetings with company teams, kick-off calls, and meetings, service level agreements established, communication methods confirmed and established
9. Complete discovery sessions and document research
10. Proposal for creating a scope of works
11. Ongoing negotiation around specification and pricing
12. Agreement confirmed and contracted, there is also a need for this to go over with legal representation too which can take time
13. Deliver a joined-up announcement from both parties if a public relationship is permissible
14. Finally, once we’ve done all the above we start the build and implementation of the project.

It is fair to say that these processes rarely follow this exact path, and often deals aren’t completed due to misaligned expectations on time, money or process.

There are three levers businesses usually pull:

Cheap — Fast — Good

You can have it FAST and CHEAP, but it won’t be GOOD

You can have it GOOD and FAST, but it won’t be CHEAP

You can have it GOOD and CHEAP, but it won’t be FAST

As you might imagine, the people that we work with want a good system that demonstrates value, so it takes planning to ensure this happens.

A strong sales process will identify all of the problems up front and address them directly. It is important to us that we are only selling in our solution to companies that actually need it, so as a start-up that needs to generate revenue quickly, we have to make sure we deliver excellence first and then the money will follow. This isn’t a quick turnaround for a cheap dollar.

Please believe us when we say that we would love to announce names and use cases on every one of our pipeline opportunities, but we need to focus on doing it right. If we do it any other way, it could cause more harm than good.

Revolutionary technology and advancements take time and with them will come greatness but it will not happen overnight.