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Excelling in Mainstream Markets Marketing ◊ Products & Services ◊ Operations |
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Challenges in crossing the chasm and serving mainstream markets:
The chasm (a term first used in this context by Geoffrey Moore) is the gulf companies need to cross when moving from their early sales stages into a significant growth phase. This typically represents a move from selling to a small number of “innovator” and “early adopter” customers, into selling to the main market – which is full of opportunity yet highly competitive.
The requirements of the main market are very different to those of the early market: business value & ROI, service predictability, software quality & performance, on-time delivery, integration, TCO and many other factors become much more important. As a result, young companies must adapt their product packaging, marketing messages, sales pipeline management and other operational processes to enable themselves to properly address this new market focus, while performing multiple sales and delivery engagements.
To succeed, such companies must also ensure that they are able to scale profitably, whereas profitability was typically not the primary concern at the earlier stage of their evolution
It’s about being able to develop, sell, deliver, make a profit and – all the while – being perceived by top-tier customers and partners as large, strong and mature enough to do business with. |
