Part 5: Thinking in Properties (Navigating the marketplace)

Hey friends, 

For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. 

To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace. If you missed previous editions, read those first: 

• Part 1: The Pain for Buyers—on why buyers need a strategy for vendor engagement
• Part 2: Do Your Homework—on how engaging the marketplace depends on where you are in the buying process
• Part 3: Thinking in Categories—on why and how to do category-first buying 
• Part 4: Thinking in Layers—on why and how to think about your stack comprehensively in horizontal layers 

In Part 5, today, we’ll cover how to create a shortlist by filtering down the list of vendors. 

If you’re a buyer, this series contains our best advice on how to make sense of the marketplace. If you’re a vendor, this doubles as a way to stand out from the competition by meeting buyers where they’re at. 

Part 5: Thinking in Properties

Remember: at this point on our journey, you should have a list of vendors that meet the minimum capabilities of the Category you’re looking for. And those vendors’ tech stacks should match the Layers you’re looking for. 

You’re almost there, but not quite. You’re most likely still going to have too many vendors on your hands. Any number over 5 is likely too many for buyers to manage. 

So despite all your good work, you still need a simple way to filter the list down to the ones you should interview.  Luckily, you’re not concerned about whether they can solve your problem… it’s more about how they’ll do it.  

You need to understand how much confidence you should have in them. In other words, you need to filter out the risky vendors. We call this filtering by each vendor’s Properties.

Filtering by Properties means finding: 

• Vendors with local resources and experience serving your geography 
• Vendors with the traction and maturity you’re looking for, e.g.:
  • Number of buildings 
  • Number of employees
  • Funding and stage of funding 
  • How long they’ve been in business 
• Vendors with experience in your vertical 
• Vendors with a pricing model that meets your procurement requirements 
• Vendors with good reviews from your peers

It’s like the Hunger Games of Smart Buildings. Which vendor is left standing? 

This isn’t just useful for narrowing down the list. You’re basically using Properties as a proxy to answer the question: can they deliver what they’re promising? 

This concludes our method for filtering the marketplace from 750+ vendors down to a shortlist you can count on one hand. To summarize: ‍

1. Filtering by Layers finds the type of categories that fit your stack
2. Filtering by Category finds the vendors that have built a solution to solve your problem 
3. Filtering by Properties finds the vendors with the lowest delivery risk 

The marketplace launches soon! In the meantime, we’re happy to help any buyer using our layered database of categorized vendors, tagged with some of the Properties above. Send us a message and let us know what you’re looking for!

—James and the Nexus Labs team

P.S.