Realistically, dollars in the sales pipeline are meaningless until they can be counted as sales receipts.
I understand what you're saying but realistically it's cause and effect. You will never get sales receipts without sales in the pipeline.
Informing investors the sales pipeline comprises over 800 discrete sales opportunities with a combined value of more than $20 million - with some individual multi-year enterprise DaasS deals capable of taking the company CFP - is preferable to not providing any 'guidance' at all. Imagine the outcry if Ian simply presented the numbers with no explanation whatsoever of progress?
If no deals are finalised in the next quarter or two, then yes, cause for concern. Until then, we know they're working on materially significant deal flow that are pending award, some of which you would presume will be signed off:
Numerous enterprise customer DaaS subscription agreement sales pending award in Australia and US
Sales and cash receipts from enterprise paid trials and recurring monthly DaaS subscriptions fell during the quarter due to timing associated with delays in pending deal award and customer prepayments received for paid enterprise trials during previous quarters.
As for your comment - material growth in the sales pipeline has probably just continued to mature (whatever that means) - seriously?
You are clearly smarter than that, and can read:
"The profile of the sales pipeline continues to mature, meaning that individual opportunities are moving through the various stages of the sales process of evaluation trial, paid trial to paying customers."
We're all frustrated, including I'd suggest, Ian Olson. But we know deals are being worked on, we know some are materially significant and we know some are pending award.
Unless of course Ian is lying through his teeth. But that would mean the entire BOD and exceutive team including Rob Newman CEO/MD of NearMap, COO Rhandy Rhoads ex Harris Geospatial, all the people at Bentley's, Autodesk and AAM, and everyone else is doing the same.
All we can do is wait to see how many deals drop and what they are worth.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest the recent 4C will prove to be an anomoly on the journey to CFP as signed deal flow increases. Especially with data points hosted now at 1.3 trillion and counting.
