Crossing the Chasm

Actually, in this context, defining marketing is not particularly difficult: It simply means taking actions to create, grow, maintain, or defend markets. (Location 462)

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. (Location 467)

As a buying group, visionaries are easy to sell but very hard to please. This is because they are buying a dream that, to some degree, will always be a dream. The “incarnation” of this dream will require the melding of numerous technologies, (Location 604)

The winning strategy is built around the entrepreneur being able to “productize” the deliverables from each phase of the visionary project. (Location 616)

A second problem: The company sells the visionary before it has the product. (Location 679)

Problem number three: Marketing falls prey to the crack between the technology enthusiast and the visionary by failing to discover, or at least failing to articulate, the compelling application that provides the order-of-magnitude leap in benefits. (Location 699)

When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get. (Location 760)

One final characteristic of pragmatist buyers is that they like to see competition—in part to get costs down, in part to have the security of more than one alternative to fall back on should anything go wrong, and in part to assure themselves they are buying from a proven market leader. This last point is crucial: Pragmatists want to buy from proven market leaders because they know that third parties will design supporting products around a market-leading product. (Location 783)

Tags: pink

Overall, to market to pragmatists, you must be patient. You need to be conversant with the issues that dominate their particular business. You need to show up at the industry-specific conferences and trade shows they attend. You need to be mentioned in articles that run in the newsletters and blogs they read. You need to be installed in other companies in their industry. You need to have developed applications for your product that are specific to their industry. You need to have partnerships and alliances with the other vendors who serve their industry. You need to have earned a reputation for quality and service. In short, you need to make yourself over into the obvious supplier of choice. (Location 793)

For all these reasons—for whole product leverage, for word-of-mouth effectiveness, and for perceived market leadership—it is critical that, when crossing the chasm, you focus exclusively on achieving a dominant position in one or two narrowly bounded market segments. (Location 1125)

A key lesson to learn here is that you want to target a beachhead segment that is: •    Big enough to matter •    Small enough to win, and a •    Good fit with your crown jewels. (Location 1292)

For (target customers—beachhead segment only) •    Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative) •    Our product is a (product category) •    That provides (compelling reason to buy). •    Unlike (the product alternative), •    We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application). (Location 2473)