| CleanTech Growth Lab

This is Part III in the Gridtech's Moneyball 3-part series:

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Signals are everywhere; in filings, hiring patterns, and interconnection queues. But only a few teams can turn that noise into a system that builds repeatable wins.

Let's take a look at how they do it.

How the Best Teams Turn Signals into Wins

Great grid-tech teams read the open field like a scout, but awareness alone does not win them the games. The real advantage comes from rhythm.

It's the ability to see movement, anticipate the play, and then step into action before anyone else realizes the season has begun.

Practically, this means being on the front foot; prepared to launch lead generation, outreach, scripts, and supporting content to support the signals you're seeing. That includes marketing and sales working together to connect with the champions you'll need on the utility side to move a purchase through (i.e., head of Flexibility, Gridmod, etc.).

Good timing, after all, is not luck. It is discipline mixed with a healthy dash of patience.

The Two Clocks Driving Every Grid-Tech Deal

Startups and utilities keep time differently. Startups chase speed and proof. Utilities defend reliability, auditability, and regulatory process.

Our job is to respect the slower clock while showing we understand exactly how a product fits into their transformation plan.

Utility Dive notes that grid-modernization programs typically align with three- to five-year capital plans, and pilots rarely move forward outside those windows.

Knowing those windows doesn’t speed the utility up, but it stops you from pushing when nothing can move. Most pilots and grid-modernization initiatives move only inside those cycles, and if you align with them, you’ve already won half the game.

Seeing the Field

Every great Moneyball story begins with better stats, and in our world that means better signal intelligence.

What starts as scattered notes such as filings, job posts, and docket updates becomes something else once you treat it as a structured habit. At Cleantech Growthlab, we often describe this as building your own scout’s logbook: a living, breathing system that helps you translate market noise into foresight.

The format does not have to be complicated. The best teams use something simple to start: a shared tracker where every line tells a story.

A few columns are all you need: region, signal type, strength, relevance, next step.
What matters isn’t how many rows you have. It’s how they start to cluster. Across clients, the same pattern keeps repeating.

In our data, territories with three or more aligned signals in a 90-day window are several times more likely to enter procurement within 12 months. A grid constraint alert, a new DER program manager hire, and an RFP in the same region all point to the probability of a pilot within the year.

Those clusters are the box scores of your market.

They are how you stop reacting to news and start reading the game in motion. Below we'll share the simple structure we use at Cleantech Growthlab to track regulatory, procurement, and pilot activity across markets.

Setting the Rhythm

Most startups still operate on their own internal calendar: quarterly OKRs, campaign plans, funding cycles. Utilities move to the steady beat of filings, rate cases, and board approvals. The friction between those two clocks is where opportunity slips away. Closing that gap is what we like to call the quiet art of rhythm.

Winning teams close that gap manage to do it through rhythm, in four steps:

Build a Signal Cadence
Review signals every week as a listening exercise, not admin. Over time you’ll feel when a funding wave is rising, plateauing, or about to break.
Tier Your Markets by Heat
A single weak signal puts a utility on your watchlist. Three aligned signals move it into your active zone: where your content, outreach, and sales attention should live.
Translate Signals into Plays
A regulatory change becomes an op-ed or outreach sequence. A hiring pattern reveals who to contact next quarter. An RFP trend points to a new campaign theme.
Match Internal Rhythm to Market Rhythm
Sync your rhythm with theirs. Plan launches, case studies, and conference pushes around their seasons, not yours. Done consistently, it feels like you’re predicting the future, but you’re just in tune with it.

That alignment is where the real Moneyball edge lives: playing your own game at the tempo of the market.

You can find our template for keeping track of these signals here: https://www.cleantechgrowthlab.com/resources/utility-buying-signal-tracker-template

Playing the Season

We saw this clearly with Loopback Systems. Their team began tracking hiring, RFP, and interconnection data across three U.S. regions.

Within six months, the same pattern we described earlier showed up in their own tracker: every territory with a cluster of constraint, funding, and new-program-lead signals entered procurement within the year.

You do not need a data science department to pull that off. What you need is rhythm, shared discipline, and a willingness to look at the same signals every week until patterns start speaking back.

Because strategy is not born from complexity; it is born from pattern recognition repeated often enough to become instinct.

And once you find that rhythm, the one that mirrors your buyers’ real movement, you stop chasing deals and start arriving just as they open the door.

Your Own Moneyball Season

Gridtech’s future belongs to teams that can see and act faster than the market expects.
If you’d like to see your own “Moneyball scorecard” (a live snapshot of utility signals active in your category) book a short consultation below. We’ll show you where movement has already begun and outline the first 2-3 plays to run.

👉 Book a Free Consultation (30-minute session with free signals report, 2-3 growth plays, and lifetime access to our playbook).

‍ “Timing isn’t luck. It’s rhythm. And rhythm is earned through repetition.”

Gridtech’s Moneyball, Part III: Signal into Strategy