Geoffrey A Moore's classic "Crossing the Chasm" is probably the single most influential high-tech marketing book to be published in the past 20 years. It describes the rites of passage that companies have to undergo if they are to move beyond their initial early adopter customer base and cross the chasm into the mainstream market.
Moore helps us recognise the markedly different influences that drive buyer behaviour on either side of the chasm, and offers time-proven prescriptions for bridging the gap. He wrote the book at a time when most markets had healthy early adopter communities that allowed promising new vendors to at least generate a little modest pre-chasm momentum.
The chasm is closer than you think...
There's no doubt that the chasm still exists - but the current market climate, combined with increasingly risk-averse buying behaviour, means that the share of most markets represented by early adopters has shrunk dramatically - leaving an even higher percentage of available budgets in the hands of pragmatic mainstream buyers.
As a result, promising new companies now have less time than ever before to work out how to address these conservatively-minded, risk-avoiding buyers. They have little option other than to find high-value, "must solve" business problems for which their offering can provide a provably superior solution. They need to move - urgently - from pitching technology to solving problems.
Impact on go-to-market strategy...
The impact on go-to-market strategy is profound. With so many fewer prospects willing to stick their neck out and speculatively invest in new technologies, vendors have to quickly identify critical business problems that their technology can solve, and craft compelling sales and marketing messages based on solutions to clearly expressed business needs.
Even start-ups are having to learn the language of business rather than the sometimes more comfortable vocabulary of technology innovation. Fortunately, there are ways in which this process can be accelerated. We work with our clients to help them identify their most promising prospects, the problems they have a compelling need to solve, and how and why they choose to buy.
How we help...
Inflexion-Point Strategy Partners help promising B2B organisations to realise their full potential by equipping them to build scalable sales and marketing machines that reflect the way their most valuable prospects prefer to buy.
We like to think of ourselves as practitioners, rather than consultants. We can point to decades of collective experience in achieving demanding revenue and profit targets, quarter after quarter – and of helping organisations stand out from the crowd and be acknowledged as market leaders.
Our systematic, evidence-based market leadership methodology
helps clients to bridge the gap between strategy and execution by enabling them to identify their most valuable prospects, understand their most urgent problems, and know how and why they make buying decisions.
We apply this learning to help our clients to craft compelling visions that resonate strongly with their prospect’s concerns, to implement practical programmes which serve to facilitate their prospect’s decision making processes, and to re-architect and re-align their sales and marketing processes in line with today's buying behaviour.
To find out more please contact us here...