• There are five different buyer categories in the technology adoption cycle:
  • Innovators
  • Early adopters
  • Early Majority
  • Late Majority
  • Laggards
• Crossing over from early adopter to early majority is the hardest part of the tech adoption lifecycle, this “the chasm”

Chapter 3 – marketing enlightenment

burden of definition onto market, which we will define, for the purposes of high tech, as:

• a set of actual or potential customers
• for a given set of products or services
• who have a common set of needs or wants, and
• who reference each other when making a buying decision

Early markets are made up of:

Innovators

• Appreciate technology for its own sake
• For example they bought digital cameras and iPhones when they were $1k
• As a buying population they care about
  • The truth without any tricks
  • If they have a problem they want access to the most technically knowledgable person
  • They want to be first to get new stuff

Early Adopters (the visionaries)

• Examples: JFK in space race, Steve Jobs put the GUI in the PC, Cisco drive order processing and CS to the internet in the 90’s etc
• They are easy to sell to but very hard to please
• Typically VP level and above in a corporation
• The most important principle stemming from all this is the emphasis on management of expectations. Because controlling expectations is so crucial, the only practical way to do business with visionaries is through a small, top-level direct sales force. At the front end of the sales cycle, you need such a group to understand the visionaries’ goals and give them confidence that your company can step up to them. In the middle of the sales cycle, you need to be extremely flexible about commitments as you begin to adapt to the visionaries’ agenda. At the end, you need to be very careful in negotiations, keeping the spark of the vision alive without committing to tasks that are unachievable within the time frame allotted. All this implies a mature and sophisticated representative working on your behalf.

Mainstream markets Are made up of:

Early majority (the pragmatists)

• Pragmatists tend to be “vertically” oriented, meaning that they communicate more with others like themselves within their own industry than do technology enthusiasts and early adopters, who are more likely to communicate “horizontally” across industry boundaries in search of kindred spirits.
• it is very tough to break into a new industry selling to pragmatists. References and relationships are very important to these people, and there is a kind of catch-22 operating: Pragmatists won’t buy from you until you are established, yet you can’t get established until they buy from you. Obviously, this works to the disadvantage of start-ups and, conversely, to the great advantage of companies with established track records.
• On the other hand, once a startup has earned its spurs with the pragmatist buyers within a given vertical market, they tend to be very loyal to it, and even go out of their way to help it succeed.
• When this happens, the cost of sales goes way down, and the leverage on incremental R&D to support any given customer goes way up. That’s one of the reasons pragmatists make such a great market.

The D-Day Analogy

When crossing the chasm it is very important to identify a niche you can latch into as a beachhead

the claim is made that, although niche strategy is generally best, we do not have time or we cannot afford to implement it now. This is a ruse, of course, the true answer being much simpler: We do not have, nor are we willing to adopt, any discipline that would ever require us to stop pursuing any sale at any time for any reason. We are, in other words, not a market driven company; we are a sales-driven company.

The consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are, to put it simply, fatal. Here’s why: The sole goal of the company during this stage of market development must be to secure a beachhead in a mainstream market that is, to create a pragma-fist customer base that is referenceable, people who can, in turn, provide us access to other mainstream prospects. To capture this reference base, we must ensure that our first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives. To do that, we must ensure that the customer gets not just the product but what we will describe in a later chapter as the whole product the complete set of products and services needed to achieve the desired result.

When licking a chasm crossing beachhead it is not about the number of people that are involved, it is about the amount of pain they are experiencing.

Example: Documnetum targeted pharmaceutical industry’s regulatory affairs, maybe 1k total people on the planet work in this job function. Once they proved their value, they expanded into other parts of business like researches on the manufacturing floor. Then to manufacturers like oil refineries, etc