Users adopted the product. The results were strong. Your internal champion told you, “This is exactly what we need.”
Then procurement got involved. Legal had questions. Operations wanted to know what happens if something breaks and who owns the risk.
Momentum slowed. Emails stalled. The deal quietly slipped into limbo.
If you sell a technically complex product into organizations that have never bought what you’re building before, this story is painfully familiar. And it’s exactly why strong pilots so often fail to turn into production deployments.
In a recent episode of Why Growth Stops, Michael Dolbec, Managing Partner at Momenta Ventures puts a sharp point on the problem: the person who loves your product usually isn’t the person who can buy it.
From decades of board and operator experience, Michael has seen this pattern repeat across AI, industrial software, and deep‑tech companies. Founders don’t lose deals because the technology failed. They lose because they built the entire sales motion around a single champion in a decision that requires five or more stakeholders to say yes.
A successful pilot feels like validation and it is. But it’s also the moment when the decision environment fundamentally changes.
Before the pilot, you’re proving that the product works. After the pilot, the organization starts asking a different set of questions:
What risk does this introduce?
Who owns the outcome if something goes wrong?
How does this fit into existing systems, contracts, and processes?
Will this decision create future problems for me or my team?
Procurement is optimizing for precedent and process. Legal is optimizing for liability. Operations is optimizing for uptime and accountability. Security and IT are optimizing for integration and control.
Your champion may still be supportive, but they often can’t protect you from any of this.
One of the most important insights from the conversation is that in mission‑critical environments, buyers aren’t just purchasing performance or ROI. They are purchasing peace of mind.
Founders often over‑index on the signals that feel positive:
enthusiastic users
successful pilot metrics
verbal confirmation that “we love it”
At the same time, they under‑index the quiet signals that determine whether production happens:
new stakeholders showing up late in the process
long review cycles with little feedback
questions about ownership, governance, and rollout responsibility
silence from the people who carry risk
The pilot proved the technology. It didn’t prove that the organization was ready, or willing, to absorb the change.
This is exactly the gap we’re addressing in our upcoming Momenta webinar:
The session is designed for founders who already know their product works and are trying to understand why deployment keeps stalling anyway. We’ll focus on what changes after a pilot succeeds, how real buying decisions are made in complex organizations, and what founders need in place to move from trial success to repeatable scale.
If you’ve ever won the pilot and still lost the deal, this conversation will likely sound uncomfortably familiar. And if you want to learn how to avoid repeating that outcome, the upcoming webinar is the natural next step.
The pilot isn’t the finish line.
It’s the moment the real buying decision begins.
From Pilot to Production: Register for the Webinar
Momenta is the leading Industrial Impact® venture capital firm, accelerating innovators across energy, manufacturing, smart spaces, and the supply chain. Our team of deep industry operators has helped scale industry leaders and innovators to improve critical industries, the environment, and people's quality of life for over a decade. PitchBook named Momenta among the world's top ten digital industry venture funds for both 2023 and 2024 in its Global Manager Performance Score League Tables, one of just two European-headquartered VCs to achieve a Top 10 ranking. For more information, please visit: momenta.vc.