Being priced to sell means that price does not become a major issue during the sales cycle. Companies crossing the chasm, coming from success in the early market with visionary customers, typically have their products priced too high. Price does become an issue with the pragmatist customer, but when the channel feeds back prospect resistance and

We began by isolating a fundamental flaw in the prevailing High-Tech Marketing Model—the notion that rapid mainstream market growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success. By analyzing the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists, we were able to see that a far more normal development would be a chasm period of little

Crossing the chasm requires moving from an environment of support among the visionaries back into one of skepticism among the pragmatists.

Once this authority is transferred, the enterprise has taken a key step in moving from a product-driven to a market-driven organization. As the shape of the mainstream market emerges, as the needs of this market can be increasingly identified through market research and customer interviews, then the whole product manager steps into…

Some highlights

The key point to notice is the transition from product to market, corresponding to crossing the chasm.

By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect a radical discontinuity between the old ways and the new, and they are prepared

Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively. They sometimes seek them out even before a formal marketing program has been launched. This is because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing. At root they are intrigued with any fundamental advance and often make a technology purchase

Visionaries—the customers dominating the early market’s development—are relatively price-insensitive. Seeking a strategic leap forward, with an order-of-magnitude return on investment, they are convinced that any immediate costs are insignificant when compared with the end result.

The truth is, conservatives often fear high tech a little bit. Therefore, they tend to invest only at the end of a technology life cycle, when products are extremely mature, market-share competition is driving low prices, and the products themselves can be treated as commodities.