An enterprise pilot can pass every technical test and still stall in procurement. The team that ran it may have had discretionary money for experiments, while the rollout needed a line in next year’s operating budget that nobody had claimed. When that happens, the seller has paid for the buyer’s research, and the pipeline report has been counting it as a sale in progress.
Sierra’s early design-partner program is a documented case of the other approach. Logan Randolph, its first go-to-market hire, told First Round Review in 2025 that Sierra charged partners up front, suggesting 10 to 20 percent of total contract value, enough that the buyer needed a manager’s sign-off and procurement. He presents the fee as a screen against buyers without a real business problem.
I read the fee as doing two more things that a free pilot skips. A fee pegged to the whole contract makes both sides price that contract before work starts. And sending the payment through approval and procurement runs the buyer’s purchase process once, early, along the route the deployment would need. On that reading the route matters as much as the amount. A fee paid from an innovation group’s discretionary budget proves that group will spend; it says little about the cost center that would fund the rollout.
The obvious objection is that Sierra could ask for this and most vendors cannot. The same interview credits its founders’ networks, and a few hand-picked partners are not a conversion rate anyone else can plan on. A lesser-known vendor that asks a large company for a sizable share of contract value before anything works may get no pilots at all.
That objection is about the fee, and the budget question survives it. A vendor that cannot charge can still ask, before kickoff, which cost center would pay for deployment and who owns it. It can also ask for commitments that cost the buyer effort rather than cash, such as system access, a standing meeting and a launch date, which a merely curious team is slow to give. When nobody can name the budget owner, the pilot may still be worth running for what it teaches. It belongs in the research budget, with its learning reported apart from qualified pipeline.
Sierra’s experience shows the approach working for a vendor with its standing; it does not forecast anyone else’s results. A vendor’s own records are the better test. Splitting past pilots by whether a deployment budget owner was named at kickoff, and comparing how often each group signed, gives a pipeline rule fitted to that vendor’s buyers.