CIMCON Lighting sells intelligent streetlight controls into cities and utilities. Their corporate presentation was a capable, well-produced product tour — and it was losing to no decision.
We ran a Problem Pyramid™ facilitation with the sales team, rebuilt the value proposition around what municipal buyers actually decide on, and restructured the presentation from the customer’s problem outward. The rebuilt positioning deck is dated 2 January 2017. On 2 August 2017, JPS — the sole distributor of electricity in Jamaica — selected CIMCON to supply 35,000 intelligent streetlight controls nationwide.
What the sales team told us, in their own words:
“We are a global company but no one knows who we are until they meet us.”
“Mayors have no power — city managers drive the buying process.”
“Lack of funding is the biggest [obstacle].”
The presentation was not badly made. It was aimed at the wrong thing. It described what the product is to an audience that needed to know what the product changes — and it did so before establishing that the buyer had a problem worth funding.
We measured both presentations rather than asserting the difference. Counting language across every slide:
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Slides | 36 | 58 |
| Customer language vs vendor language | 1.31× | 2.00× |
| Money & quantity terms | 8 | 21 |
| Problem-framing terms | 0 | 5 |
| First slide framing a customer problem | never | #2 |
Opens with “CIMCON Lighting helps owners monitor, maintain and monetize their outdoor lighting.” Slides 2 and 3 cover macro trends. From slide 6 onward it is product: controller form factors, then “Central Management System” five slides in a row, then partner ecosystem, open architecture, modular platform. Across 36 slides, not one frames a problem the buyer has.
Opens with the Value Selling Proposition. Slide 2 is Challenge #1. Then: how the industry addresses municipal energy costs, why it is hard, the “dumb” photocell, and the implications of not acting — the cost of doing nothing, stated before any product claim. Police force-reduction data establishes the public-safety persona. The Value Simulator — Build the Business Case, Confirm the Numbers arrives at slide 24. Product specifications survive, but they start at slide 35, after the buyer has a reason to care.
A facilitated session with the sales team surfaced the municipal problem in the buyer’s terms: “Difficult maintaining current and future levels of city services with existing resources.” Causes were traced beneath it — unfunded mandates, declining state funding, escalating energy and maintenance costs on ageing HPS streetlights, and spotters manually monitoring lights that fail at 20% a year.
The baseline was made countable before any benefit was claimed: city light hours and KW cost per hour, additional revenue lines, 3 FTEs at 25% of time on maintenance and repair, 1 FTE at 25% managing crew scheduling, logistics and parts.
Every differentiating feature was bound to a metric a city finance officer can carry into a budget meeting — additional revenue in dollars, maintenance FTEs and managers in headcount, lights and average KW per year against LED cost.
Between the Problem Pyramid and the rebuilt deck sits the piece that made the rest possible: a value chain map connecting the product’s data layer to every stakeholder who touches the buying decision, and to the measure each of them is judged on.
The map traced the path a purchase actually travels — Street Light Manager → IT Manager → City Controller — and attached to each the thing they are accountable for. The Street Light Manager cares about energy and asset management. The IT Manager cares about scalability, open standards and extendability. The City Controller cares about cashflow and zero tax impact. One deck aimed at “the city” speaks to none of them.
Note what is not on that list: controller form factors, form factors, API surface. None of the measures a buyer is judged on are product attributes. That is the whole reason a product tour loses the room.
The map carries a case study timeline — Issue → Metrics → Pilot → Year 1 → Revenue Year 1 — drawn at the start of the engagement, not the end. The measurement that would later prove the value was designed before anything was installed. That is the difference between a case study you can write and one you wish you could.
The before deck sits at Level 2 — Features, touting the product, drifting into Level 3 benefits with capability claims such as “reduce maintenance costs by up to 70%.” An “up to” percentage with no baseline is a number a CFO discounts to zero.
The rebuilt deck reaches Level 5 — REAL ROI. A named buyer problem, a measured baseline, the cost of doing nothing, metrics in the customer’s own units, and a simulator that builds the business case with the customer’s own numbers rather than ours.
“CIMCON’s intelligent controls to help JPS implement its vision beyond a Connected City to a Connected Nation.”
The rebuilt deck led on being light agnostic, on AMI, on ANSI C136.34, on open architecture and APIs. That was 2017.
Market analysts now name proprietary systems and vendor lock-in as the single largest opening for challengers in municipal lighting — bids are won on vendor-agnostic dashboards and standards-based hardware. The position we built for CIMCON is the position the market now says wins.
That is not luck, and it is the argument for the method. Feature-led positioning decays, because features get copied, superseded, or commoditised inside a product cycle. Problem-led positioning persists, because the buyer’s problem persists. A city that could not maintain service levels with existing resources in 2017 still cannot today — and a controller who needs zero tax impact still needs it. Build the message on the problem and it survives the product roadmap.
Engagement delivered under the How to Dominate Local Markets practice, now ValueLogics.ai. Award details as published by CIMCON Lighting, 2 August 2017. Market figures: SNS Insider (smart street lighting), Grand View Research (category scope), Berg Insight (installed base).