Things broke down when we got to the marketing people. I talked to about two dozen companies over the span of a year with similar results and with no success. Sometimes I would be invited to prepare and give a talk, but nothing more would come of the visit. You may have good ideas, but nobody else thinks so. There is the temptation to view this phase as wasted time, but you never know when the connections you make, which did not work out at the time, may prove useful later.
Money is important, but people are more important.
It is hard to get people to part with money, but it is much harder to get them to part with their time. We will come back to this later when I talk about the key people in the design team.