Your Pilot Went Well. So Why Isn't It Turning Into a Contract?

The question I hear most often from water technology companies is not “how do we get pilots.” If you’re still working on getting into the building, start with how to sell to water utilities first. Pilots are relatively accessible. Utilities are often willing to run a proof of concept, particularly if the vendor absorbs the cost.

The question I hear most often is: “We have five pilots. None of them are converting. What are we doing wrong?”

This is one of the most common and most expensive problems in water technology sales. The pilot portfolio grows, the team celebrates each new logo, and the revenue line stays flat. We’ve written a dedicated guide on how to move from pilot to procurement; this piece focuses on the design of the pilot itself. Understanding why this happens, and how to design your way out of it, is worth spending time on.

Why pilots stall

Pilots stall for a small number of reasons, and diagnosing which one applies to you is the first step.

The problem is real, but not urgent. The utility agreed to a pilot because the technology is interesting and the cost was low. But the problem it solves is not on anyone’s priority list this year. The pilot completes successfully, the report sits in someone’s inbox, and nothing happens. There is no urgency driving a procurement decision.

The champion does not have a path to a budget. Your internal champion at the utility believes in the product. They do not have the authority to approve a contract, and the capital or operating plan does not have a line item that this purchase maps to cleanly. They cannot make a case to leadership because they do not know how to fund it.

Success was never defined. The pilot ran for six months and generated data. But there was no agreed-upon definition of what success looked like, no threshold that both parties committed to in advance, and no agreed next step if that threshold was met. The utility views the pilot as interesting information; you view it as a green light. Neither party is wrong, but the ambiguity works against you.

The utility is running your pilot alongside three others. This is more common than vendors realize. Utilities often run multiple pilots in a given technology category simultaneously. They may have no intention of converting any of them to a contract before they have data across all of them. If you do not know you are in a competitive pilot situation, you cannot manage it.

The product does not meet the bar. Sometimes the honest answer is that the pilot revealed product gaps: performance below expectations, integration complexity that is too high, operational burden that is too heavy for the utility’s team. This is the hardest conclusion to reach, but it is important to distinguish it from the other causes.

How to design pilots that convert

The goal of a pilot is not to demonstrate that your technology works. It is to create a documented, agreed-upon basis for a procurement decision. Those are related but not identical. Designing for the second goal changes several things about how you structure the engagement.

Define success before you start, in writing. How you present in the initial evaluation also matters; see our guide on what makes a great water technology demo. What specific metrics, at what thresholds, over what time period, would demonstrate that the technology delivers the value you are claiming? This definition should be agreed to by both parties before the pilot begins, not written into the pilot agreement by the vendor and passively accepted by the utility, but actively negotiated so that the utility has genuine ownership of it.

If the utility is unwilling to define what success looks like in advance, that is important information. It may mean they are not serious about procurement, or it may mean they do not trust the technology enough to commit to a standard. Either way, you want to know that before you invest in the pilot.

Agree on what happens if the pilot succeeds. “We’ll take the results to leadership” is not an answer. Who specifically? When? What is the timeline for a decision? Is there a budget mechanism that a purchase could flow through? Is there a capital plan that could fund a full deployment, and when is that updated?

You are not trying to extract a commitment to buy before the pilot demonstrates value. You are trying to establish that there is a credible path from a successful pilot to a procurement decision. If that path does not exist, if the champion does not know how the purchase would be funded or who would approve it, the pilot is likely to stall regardless of results.

Involve the decision-makers, not just the champion. The technical champion is your advocate inside the utility, but they are not the decision-maker. The pilot design should create natural touchpoints with the broader decision-making team: mid-pilot briefings, results presentations, site visits by leadership. If the people who will eventually approve a contract have never seen your technology or met your team, a successful pilot report is still asking them to take a significant leap of faith.

Build in a clear decision point. The pilot should have a defined end date and a defined decision process — not a rolling continuation that never reaches a conclusion. At the end of the pilot, there should be a meeting in which the results are reviewed against the agreed success criteria and a decision is made: proceed to procurement, extend with defined additional criteria, or conclude without moving forward.

The third outcome is not a failure if it was reached honestly. It is information. The failure mode is a pilot that neither succeeds nor fails but simply continues indefinitely because no one has forced a conclusion.

Pricing the pilot

Subsidized or free pilots are often necessary to get in the door, particularly with utilities that have no prior relationship with your company. But they create a dynamic worth managing carefully.

When the pilot is free, the utility has limited skin in the game. They agreed to it because the cost of saying yes was very low, not necessarily because they are seriously evaluating a purchase. A pilot with a nominal cost, or a pilot structured as a paid proof of concept with a credit toward the full contract, changes the dynamic. The utility has made a financial commitment, which signals genuine interest and creates a stronger internal justification for proceeding to procurement.

Not every utility will agree to a paid pilot. But it is worth asking, and the response tells you something about how serious they are.

What to do with stalled pilots

If you have pilots that have been sitting without progress for more than six months past the agreed evaluation period, you have a decision to make. You can let them sit, which costs you time and opportunity cost, or you can force a conclusion.

Forcing a conclusion means going back to the champion and being direct: the pilot has been complete for X months, the results met the agreed success criteria, and we need to understand the path forward. If there is no path (no budget, no timeline, no decision authority) it is better to know that now than to continue investing in the relationship at the same level.

Sometimes this conversation unlocks something. The champion has been meaning to escalate but has not. The budget conversation is further along than you knew. There is a procurement window opening that you were not aware of.

Sometimes it confirms that the deal is not happening. That is also valuable: it lets you stop managing a stalled relationship and redirect your time toward accounts where a path exists.

The utilities that convert pilots to contracts are the ones where someone on both sides of the table was accountable to a clear next step. Build that accountability into every pilot you run.

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HydroKnowledge works with water technology companies on go-to-market strategy, sales process design, and pipeline acceleration. Get in touch if your pilots aren’t converting.