When Gregg Curwin met potential clients in New England last month, he tried using an early adopter pitch he’d just learned from Gerry Pond at the Entrevestor Dinner in Fredericton.

Curwin is the Founder and CEO of Truleaf Smart Plant Systems, a Halifax venture that grows plants in stacked trays under LED lights. He attended the dinner in Fredericton and was especially impressed by the strategy for signing up early adopters outlined by Pond, the chairman of East Valley Ventures.

“I was in the States, and used the early adopter pitch with the Truleaf pitch,” said Curwin. “They loved it and it worked very well. They want me back to meet senior execs.”

Pond’s solution was a quite simple strategy for young companies to get that all-important first client. Atlantic Canadian business-to-business startups find it an especially difficult task because of there are few large companies in the region. Governments can fill the void in theory, but they tend to make decisions and adopt new processes slowly.

To help ameliorate this key pain for the community, Entrevestor invited Pond to outline the problem at our dinner, propose some solutions and generate some discussion among the 50 or so guests. (We also debated mentorship, which I will discuss in a coming column.)

Pond suggested that one way for startups to gain early adopters is to propose a pilot project. The startup can propose to work – possibly without pay – with the potential customer so that the two parties test the new innovation. For the customer, it’s an opportunity to bring on new technology without a large financial outlay, and the possibility of a productivity gain. For the startup, it’s a chance to gain feedback and to work out kinks. And of course, the goal is to remove the word “potential” from potential customer. The idea is to convert the customer into a paying client, possibly even an investor.

Pond recounted the story of one of the East Valley Ventures companies, SHIFT Energy, which has developed an automated solution to help large facilities save energy. It had no national clients but sent out messages to companies around the continent offering this sort of arrangement.

SHIFT got some responses, including interest from the Vancouver Canucks, which owns the Rogers Centre in the Western city. It turns out a hockey rink is a surprisingly complex consumer of energy, and SHIFT was able to work with the group and is looking forward to converting them into paying customers. Pond suggested that this is a strategy that should be adopted more frequently in the region.

“It’s about building relationships with strangers,” said Pond. “We didn’t know anyone from the Vancouver Canucks when we started the process.”

We want to solicit more opinions from the broader community on this subject. Should accelerators do more to develop early adopter strategies? Do we need formalized early adopter strategy? Should we formally recognize early adopters from the region? Please join in the discussion by leaving comments below.

Developing a better infrastructure for finding early adopters will mean more companies will get to revenue more quickly.