RTLS Go-To-Market

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Understanding the power of digital transformation - this was the topic of our previous blog post - we now have a look at how RTLS Go-To-Market (GTM) changes as the company matures. 

This blog is all about selling RTLS. RTLS makes most sense in an IOT context. It  excels as a combination of location-awareness with sensors and analytics. Dove-tailed with desired business outcomes. So we say RTLS and mean all of this :-) 


GTM maturity progression somehow follows - or should follow - the business life cycle S-curve.

In plain English a sales description could sound like this:
  • Getting off the Ground: Pilots and Prove of Concepts (POC). Learn.
  • Proving Relevance: Medium-size paid-for projects - preferably with well-known tier 1 companies. Still one-offs.
  • Scaling the Business: Winning and executing significant paid-for projects. Reaping the benefit of synergies between projects. Step and repeat.

Three phases - three distinctly different approaches and three sets of KPIs that define success. Just to be clear: We are talking about maturity progression of the RTLS vendor at this point.


Phase 1: Getting Off the Ground


Pilots and Prove of Concepts (POCs) of limited in scope are an ideal vehicle to learn the technology and how the product portfolio works in the field. Do we have all relevant aspects covered? What is missing? 

 Technology and products are ready somehow. The team understands what it takes to drive meaningful results for customers. Now it’s time to sync-up with reality: Experience project implementation workflows with customers. Understand the real challenges. Location infrastructure and its ground truth information (aka anchor positioning) would be a typical learning in this phase. Wildly underestimated by most people until relatively late in their GTM!

 On the business side this phase is about building and gaining trust - having customers develop trust in the solution and also gaining self confidence of the teams in regards to planning and execution. 

 Candidate customers in this phase would be required to take risks. Project could technically fail or fail to deliver any meaningful business results.

 With a number of pilots and POCs done the business starts to understand the underlying mechanisms. Combining it with self-confidence and trust from those early engagements leads to more ambitious goals. 
Phase 2: Proving Relevance
Installing with a tier 1 player in a target market is viewed as prove of relevance. If you can do it there, you can do it everywhere.

There is no way around proving relevance as a young company. It is an inevitable requirement. It must be done - several times. Be careful, however, common pit-falls may cost you dearly.
A typical scenario could look like this: The organization starts engaging a tier 1 customer hoping to scale her business this way. Often customers dangle the carrot of a company-wide role out in front of the inexperienced team. 

In reality, however, projects are limited in scope. Installing across multiple manufacturing locations is only a theoretical option, at least at this stage. It’s not yet plan of record! Instead projects have limited resources and small or no budgets assigned. The burden is carried by the vendor mostly.

Putting it bluntly: Corporations learn how to use RTLS at the expense of a young technology vendor. „To make it work properly“ she pays with excessive resources hoping to get a broader role-out quickly. If there are technical difficulties (solution maturity) the situation may turn into a deadly spiral.
A few considerations to get it right: 


  • Be sure your target customers runs a clearly defined project with goals, expected outcomes and at least some resources assigned. Think twice if you are required to do a free of charge project. This likely indicates abuse.
  • Do larger scope POCs only if your team is confident to have an (almost) complete solution. Make an effort to anticipate all the missing bits.
  • Simulate engagement, planning and implementation sequences to uncover any gaps in your or your customer’s thought process. Fix them as soon as possible.
  • Set-up an agreement with your customers. It needs to spell out who does what and define success and failure. It might be painfully difficult, however, thinking through the project beforehand may again help to uncover gaps and potential issues.

Phase 3: Scaling the Business

As of today no RTLS company that I know of has fully embraced a step and repeat sales process that scales swiftly and in a fully predictable manner.

Let’s still have a look at some DOs and some DON’Ts in our next blog post  that have already been visible on the market. Stay tuned.



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