From the Q3 CC,
pretend you are an aspiring high school writer sitting down to take the SAT and are asked to tick one of two boxes (in the english/reading/comprehension section) (no spin, just tick a box):
Is the writer below trying to explain:
a) that they are "right on schedule" [blue's choice]
or
b) that they are behind schedule [dig's choice]
"Bill Solms: Well, let me answer that in pieces, okay? First of all as the CEO it is very frustrating to me not to close those deals in Q3. We released the - you know, in hindsight, you know, there might not have been enough time. You know, we released it at the end of July, it was July 23rd I think, and it gave us basically you know, two of the three months. I will tell you that discounts did drive and it accelerated the pace of a number of the conversations we were having.
We legitimately thought that we had a couple deals that were going to close before the end of Q3 that didn’t, and you asked a question of why you thought they didn’t, and I would tell you that there’s a couple things. One is one of the advantages of being a small company is that we’re agile and can react quickly and can do things like you know, churn out a new product like virtual smart card 2.0 in a very small amount of time compared to the amount of time it takes for a large company to pivot to a new product.
One of the disadvantages is that big companies which - and big companies need our stuff, big organizations need our solutions - look at Wave and there’s a disadvantage to being a small company with small revenues, and so several times we’ve had opportunities that have been slowed down a bit that required us to go and talk to the potential customer and explain where Wave stands financially and what our roadmap is going forward and to give them the confidence that we’re a good partner to invest in.
And I would tell you that after those conversations we haven’t had anybody pull out of it, but as large companies do when they do their risk management, you know, they do ask those questions and it requires us to mitigate the downside by partnering with larger companies and as you throw those factors in, it has slowed down the discussions on a number of the opportunities. So I think I addressed the fact that like I’m frustrated that it didn’t occur when we thought it did.
I certainly have enough experience you know, in sales to make some fairly decent calls and it’s not just a pipe dream when I’m looking at opportunity and believing that it has a good potential to close and we - I think we’ve correctly identified what the issues are that are slowing them down, and you know, no sales pipeline’s ever perfect. You know, you never, you know, even in my best years I never closed 100% you know, of the things I thought.
You always have to have alternatives, and what we’ve seen, though, very importantly, what we’ve seen is that the deals in the vast majority of the cases haven’t gone away. The question is properly timing when they’re going to come in, not saying that they are going to come in versus not going to come in. And so you might have noticed there’s a certain amount of confidence still in what we’re talking about for where we think the company’s headed, and a lot of it is based on the number of folks that we’re talking to.
Currently we have, you know, somewhere in the range of 100 virtual smart card opportunities that we’re pursuing in various stages. The interesting thing about that is that’s not cannibalizing off of other products and services that we would have been selling. That’s all additive to what we already have been doing as a business, and on top of that you know, with this increased margin campaign that we’ve just done, we’re really looking to drive up the demand generation for that product in particular.
So I’m frustrated it didn’t happen in Q3. I had hoped that such a dramatic discount would cause people to move faster. It - you know, it turns out that you know, we have only a very small number of customers take advantage of that. I am continuing to offer some discounts, but those are now on a case by case basis, so I’m not going to disclose publicly what they are. I will tell you that it’s not as much as it was previously, and I think that’s - I think that, you know, is about all I want to say on that topic. I hope I answered your question."
The above content is my opinion.
