Adding more transparency to the buying process
If you’re buying energy submeters or energy monitoring products in the next 3–6 months, you’re likely dreading it.
According to Forrester research, over 70% of us prefer to research products online instead of talking to sales people.
When we asked, the most common reasons we heard were:
- You have to introduce yourself and explain your situation repeatedly
- The number of options can be overwhelming. It takes a lot of time to find the ones that might be worth your time.
- It would take more time and patience than you have to hear that many sales pitches. You have other things to do
- Because the process is so heavy, you’d like to do this once and it needs to work the first time around.
There’s just something that bothers us about knowing the person we’re talking to may have an incentive tied to a transaction with them specifically.
Customers want to google the answer instead of stumbling through calendars and web conference software that never works.
That’s why Verdigris is building the Submeter Buyer Guide. It’s exactly what it sounds like — a free, downloadable spreadsheet with a bunch of options and attributes. We’re interviewing industry experts and collecting data from market vendors in a single spreadsheet so you don’t have to.
Check out the guide at http://submeter.energy
This spreadsheet is:
- publicly available on the internet
- crowdsourced and validated by real users
- free with no downloads or demo registrations
- a spreadsheet! You can filter it, download it, or use it however you like.
You can think of it as a flexible consumer report for submeters written by the DOE / EC and the Better Business Bureau.
This way, customers can choose the solution that meets the unique requirements of their businesses.
We started Verdigris with the mission of bending the CO2 curve. We think we make great products. We also know we’re not always the right fit for every situation. We value transparency in our work and think that’s important for building trust.
We’ve seen people doing this data collection and analysis work over and over again.
We’d like to solve that problem too. We think this initiative will expand the market for consumers by encouraging more transparent vendor competition and by connecting suppliers and buyers.
That’s good for buyers, us, the industry, and the mission — everyone wins.