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the visionaries, who dominate the buying decisions in this market, but it is the technology enthusiasts who are first to realize the potential in the new product.
the first people to adopt any new technology are those who appreciate the technology for its own sake.
They are the ones who first appreciate the architecture of your product and why it therefore has a competitive advantage over the current crop of products established in the marketplace.
In business, technology enthusiasts are the gatekeepers for any new technology.
First, and most crucially, they want the truth, and without any tricks. Second, wherever possible, whenever they have a technical problem, they want access to the most technically knowledgeable person to answer it.
Third, they want to be first to get the new stuff.
Finally, they want everything cheap.
The key consequence here is, if it is their money, you have to make it available cheap, and if it is not, you have to make sure price is not their concern.
In large companies, technology enthusiasts can most often be found in the advanced technology group, or some such congregation, chartered with keeping the company abreast of the latest developments in high tech.
In smaller companies,
IT (information technology) group or a member of a product design team who either will specify your product for inclusion into the overall system or supply it to the rest of the team as a technology aid or tool.
you need to place your message in one of their various haunts—on the Web, of course. Direct response advertising works well with this group,
Direct email will reach them—and provided it is factual and new information, they read cover to cover.
for the most part, these people are not powerful enough to dictate the buying decisions of others, nor do they represent a significant market in themselves.
What they represent instead is a sounding board for initial product or service features and a test bed for introducing modifications to the product or service until it is thoroughly “debugged.”
let them in on the secret, to let them play with the product and give you their feedback,
The other key to working with enthusiasts toward a successful marketing campaign is to find the ones who have access to the big boss.
the kind of big boss we are looking for,
the visionaries.
Visionaries are that rare breed of people who have the insight to match up an emerging technology to a
strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into that project.
Steve Jobs took the Xerox PARC user interface out of the laboratory and put it into a Macintosh personal computer “for the rest of us,”
Didn't invent the user interface?! Found elsewhere with some other innovators who didn't see the potential of the technology
As a class, visionaries tend to be recent entrants to the executive ranks, highly motivated, and driven by a “dream.”
In every case, these people took significant business risks with what at the time was unproven technology and/or an unproven company in order to achieve breakthrough improvements in productivity and customer service.
Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.
The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary focuses on value not from a system’s technology per se but rather from the strategic leap forward such technology can enable.
In other words, from the significant value the technology, as a driving force, can deliver to change the world in a meaningful way (safer, faster, cleaner, cheaper, etc)
the potential for an “order-of-magnitude” return on investment and willingly take high risks to pursue that goal.
Because they see such vast potential for the technology they have in mind, they are the least price-sensitive of any segment of the technology adoption profile.
they can usually provide up-front money to seed additional development that supports their project—
they are usually more than willing to serve as highly visible references, thereby drawing the attention of the business press and additional customers to small fledgling enterprises.
visionaries are easy to sell but very hard to please.
First, visionaries like a project orientation. They want to start out with a pilot project, which makes sense because they are “going where no man has gone before,” and you are going there with them.
The winning strategy is built around the entrepreneur being able to “productize” the deliverables from each phase of the visionary project.
for the visionary the deliverables of phase one are only of marginal interest—
these same deliverables, repackaged, can be a whole product to someone with less ambitious goals.
It is important, therefore, in creating the phases of the visionary’s project to build in milestones that lend themselves to this sort of product spin-off.
the classic weaknesses of entrepreneurs—lust after the big score and overconfidence in their ability to execute within any given time frame.
Careful Matt...check your optimism
The goal should be to package each of the phases such that each phase:
is accomplishable by mere mortals working in earth time
provides the vendor with a marketable product
provides the customer with a concrete return on investment that can be celebrated as a major step forward.
The most important principle stemming from all this is the emphasis on management of expectations.
you need such a group to understand the visionaries’ goals and give them confidence
you need to be extremely flexible about commitments as you begin to adapt to the visionaries’ agenda.
be very careful in negotiations, keeping the spark of the vision alive without committing to tasks that are unachievab...
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they must have achieved at least a senior vice presidential level in order to have the clout to fund their visions.
typically you don’t find them, they find you.
The way they find you, interestingly enough, is by maintaining relationships with...
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visionaries represent an opportunity early in a product’s life cycle to generate a burst of revenue and gain exceptional visibility.
Who are my enthusiasts and visionaries? Which ones have i already connected with? How did we connect?
There are numerous other scenarios where the early market does not even get a proper start. Here are some of them:
