This is the 3rd of a series of articles on IoT business models stemming from Don Barnetson’s sabbatical. Input and comments are welcomed. Prior articles on Hard Savings and Soft Savings.

Contemporary IoT value propositions fall into three categories – hard savings (ROI), soft savings and customer revenue growth. These categories require materially different go to market strategies and are difficult to package into a single vertical product thus it is critical that vendors identify their space clearly in advance.

Revenue Growth

Companies have two kinds of problems: Not Enough Revenue and Everything else. -- anon

Creating an IoT product with the premise of boosting customer revenue is often considered the holy grail of product management for two key reasons:

1. You can drive customer executive engagement and attention to your solution and sell from the top down
2. You see an opportunity to price it on a share of revenue gains – to essentially take a commission on the revenue you create for a customer.

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This is the first of a series of articles on IoT business models stemming from Don Barnetson’s sabbatical. Input and comments are welcomed.

Contemporary IoT value propositions fall into three categories – hard savings (ROI), soft savings and revenue enhancement. These categories require materially different go to market strategies and are difficult to package into a single vertical product thus it is critical that vendors identify their space clearly in advance.

Hard ROI Savings

Hard savings involve curtailing an external (ie, outsourced) expense with some piece of IoT technology. The simplest example is an energy retrofit of a building which deploys technology and capital to energy expense curtailing external spend on energy with utilities.…

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