Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

While reasonable from the customer’s point of view, this project orientation is usually at odds with the intentions of entrepreneurial vendors who are trying to create a more universally applicable product around which they can build a multi-customer business. This is potentially a lose-lose situation threatening both the quality of the vendor’s work and the fabric of the relationship, and it requires careful account management including frequent contact at the executive level. The winning strategy is built around the entrepreneur being able to “productize” the deliverables from each phase of the visionary project. That is, whereas for the visionary the deliverables of phase one are only of marginal interest—proof of concept with some productivity improvement gained, but not “the vision”—these same deliverables, repackaged, can be a whole product to someone with less ambitious goals.