We will share the experience of Ararat Ikilikyan CEO at ICU, Galileosky partner, who has successfully implemented machinery monitoring projects in the three largest open pits in Armenia.
Determine who is the decision maker in the company
Before you start preparing the presentation of the project, determine who in the decision maker and try to involve him/her in the negotiations. Face-to-face communication with vehicle fleet or a company owner will be the fastest and most effective way to reach an agreement, because this person is most interested in the improvement and organizations’ financial well-being.
Moreover, before preparing your presentation, browse information about the company yourself. Use website, social media or corporate YouTube channel. Try to find out the barand and model of the vehicles that customer's fleet consists of. Include in your project presentation projects you have implemented with these brands. Show the client that you are experienced with desired vehicles.
Define most priority challenges
Owners are not always able to assess the processes accurately and determine the tasks that relate to equipment maintenance and operations optimization. That's okay. The leader may have a different background, a wide pool of different responsibilities and a burning to-do list. Therefore, try to determine the necessary base that client wants to see as the result. This could be fuel monitoring, productivity increasing, or staff monitoring.
An effective way is not just to offer the client options for a solution, but to involve him in a face-to-face dialogue. Try to show use cases, explain where, when and what results will be achieved, thanks to the monitoring system.
Take your own case studies and show them at the meetings or publish texts on your site. Real stories are a great tool to show results that companies achieved using IoT solutions.
Ararat Ikilikyan, CEO at ICU
Remember that clients are not always specialists in telematics. They can be successful in agribusiness, wells construction and maintenance, and it is easier for they to entrust monitoring to professionals. Try to prove that you are the one, who can implement the solution in a short time and do it with high accuracy.
Install test samples
Send 1-3 mounts and monitor several machine types for free. Such a way will help you pinpoint specific positions, where company can save much money. Moreover, it will increase the budget calculation accuracy and allow to assess the situation objectively. In this case, free tests and comprehensive monitoring are not only an investment in future cooperation, but also a fairly in-depth audit.
Thus, you will be able to supplement the created list of urgent tasks and solve them to reach tangible improvements. Moreover, potential savings demonstration based on the clients’ own company will be the best argument on the way to reaching agreement on the project implementation.
Agree on a budget and define deadlines clearly
When installing tests, tell the customer the final cost of equipping and monitoring each machinery unit. Based on the audit data, calculate and write down the estimate number of tracker, CAN readers, FLS and any other peripherals required for the project implementation. Transparency and clear pricing will increase customer confidence and are a great advantage to your reputation.
When setting the deadlines, keep in mind that vehicles are not always available for installation. Cars can go on a route or stay in the service for scheduled maintenance. This can increase hardware setup and solution debugging time. However, there are non-standard cases, which we will talk about in the next paragraph.
Motivate clients to participate in the debugging phase
Vehicles may not be available due to typical problems. Moreover, there is a problem when staff is extremely negative and rejects all changes in the organization. To avoid such difficulties, explain owner the sharp need to participate actively in the debugging process and be in touch with each other if notice opposition from employees. Convince the manager that solution implementation quality, its reliability and installation speed depend on how much time vehicles are available for integrator.
We’ve listed 6 main stages that integrators of IoT solutions go through on the way to win the project. Of course, situation can develop according to a completely different scenario.
Do you have a project in progress? Need help negotiating or preparing a presentation? Contact Galileosky specialists. We will guide you in choosing equipment for the task and give advice on paper works and help to prepare the necessary materials for successful project implementation.
