Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

This is a long-term agenda, requiring careful pacing, recurrent investment, and a mature management team. One of its biggest payoffs, on the other hand, is that it not only delivers the pragmatist element of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle but tees up the conservative element as well.

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.

Finally, there is a third compelling reason to be niche focused when crossing the chasm, which has to do with the need to achieve market leadership. Pragmatist customers want to buy from market leaders. Their motive is simple: Whole products grow up around the market-leading products and not around the others.

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. In other words, they are planning on living with this decision personally for a long time to come.

The last point is crucial. Getting closure with visionaries is next to impossible. Expectations derived from dreams simply cannot be met. This is not to devalue the dream, for without it there would be no directing force to drive progress of any sort. What is important is to celebrate continually the tangible and partial both as useful things in th

Say your revenue target is $10 million over all. That means $5 million from the target segment. It also means that same $5 million has to represent at least half of the total orders from the segment if you are to have the desired market-leader impact. In other words, if you are going to be a $10 million company next year you do not want to attack a

If you try out this exercise of choosing the competition, and have trouble finding either a single, clear market alternative, or a credible second vendor leveraging your type of disruptive technology, this is a clue. It means that you are probably not ready to cross the chasm.

A product marketing manager is always a member of the marketing organization, never of the development group, and is responsible for bringing the product to the marketplace and making it accessible to the distribution channel. This includes all the elements on the crossing-the-chasm agenda, from target customer identification through to pricing. It

The initial customer set for a new technology product is made up primarily of innovators and early adopters. In the high-tech industry, the innovators are better known as technology enthusiasts or just techies, whereas the early adopters are the visionaries. It is the latter group, the visionaries, who dominate the buying decisions in this market,