More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 9 - October 8, 2018
it is the market-centric value system—supplemented (but not superseded) by the product-centric one—that must be the basis for the value profile of the target customers when crossing the chasm.
you create the two beacons that triangulate to teach the market your positioning.
Chasm-crossing requires a single target beachhead segment, and in that segment, there needs to exist already the budget dollars to buy your offer.
it must exist, or else you will lose a full year just in educating the market to put aside money that might be used to buy your product in the following year.
Most people resist selling but enjoy buying. By focusing on making a product easy to buy, you are focusing on what the customers really want.
1. Name it and frame it.
2. Who for and what for.
Competition and differentiation.
1. The claim.
2. The evidence.
3. Communications.
Feedback and adjustment.
Establishing relationships of trust, therefore, rather than wowing them on a one-time basis, is key to any ongoing success.
1. Whatever your claim is, it cannot be transmitted by word of mouth.
2. Your marketing communications will be all over the map.
3. Your R&D will be all over the map.
4. You won’t be able to recruit partners and allies,
5. You are not likely to get financing from anybody with experience.
The key is to define your position based on the target segment you intend to dominate and the value proposition you intend to dominate it with.
If you don’t make the choice to fill the space with a single attribute, then the market will do it for you. And since the market includes your competition trying to unposition you, don’t count on it to be kind.
Positioning is not about hype. It is about clear and precise direction.
The key point to notice is the transition from product to market, corresponding to crossing the chasm. This is simply a corroboration of a point we have been making all along, that pragmatists are more interested in the market’s response to a product than in the product itself.
It is a matter of other people—theoretically disinterested third parties—voting to endorse your product through not only words but deeds.
In sum, to the pragmatist buyer, the most powerful evidence of leadership and likelihood of competitive victory is market share. In the absence of definitive numbers here, pragmatists will look to the quality and number of partners and allies you have assembled in your camp, and their degree of demonstrable commitment to your cause.
The key objective in either case is to communicate the bandwagon effect in progress.
For a technology story to be a business story, it has to be about something that transcends high tech. Typically, the seed of the story is either a new type of opportunity or problem that can now be addressed effectively because of advances in the industry. These advances will have been sparked by technology breakthroughs, and that will be part of the story, but they are now seen to extend to the entire whole product infrastructure, and that will be the main thrust of the story.
So building relationships with business press editors, initially around a whole product story, is a key tactic in crossing the chasm. In addition to the business pres, the other
meetings of professional associations, and publications dedicated to a specific market segment all tend to attract pragmatists and conservatives, people who put a high value on maintaining relationships within their group.
Focus the competition within the market segment established by your must-have value proposition—
Create the competition around what, for a pragmatist buyer, represents a reasonable and reasonably comprehensive set of alternative ways of achieving this value proposition.
Focus your communications by reducing your fundamental competitive claim to a two-sentence formula and then managing every piece of company communication to ensure that it always stays within the bounds set out by that formula.
Demonstrate the validity of your competitive claim through the quality of your whole product solution and the quality of your partners and allies, so that the pragmatist buyer will conclude you are, or must shortly become, the indisputable leader of this competitive set.
looming impact of the greatest change to distribution methods perhaps ever—namely, the Internet.
First and foremost, the retail system works optimally when its job
Telesales (and teleservice).
Value-added resellers.
Use direct sales and support as a demand-creation channel to penetrate the initial target segment and then, 2. Once the segment has become aware of your presence and leadership, to transition to the most efficient fulfillment channel for your offer.
The principles and practices for successful postchasm management of financial, organizational, and product development issues are all significantly different from their prechasm counterparts, and not everyone is adaptable or amenable to the changes required to operate in the new order.
It is the move from being pioneers to becoming settlers.
Their fundamental interest is to innovate, not administrate.
It is critical, therefore, that as the enterprise shifts from the product-centric world of the early market to the market-centric world of the mainstream, that pioneer technologists be transferred elsewhere—ideally, into another project within the enterprise, but if necessary, to another company.
The key to leaving the chasm behind, however, is to stop custom developments and institutionalize the whole product, to build to a set of standards that the marketplace as a whole can support.
A product manager is a member of either the marketing organization or the development organization who is responsible for ensuring that a product gets created, tested, and shipped on schedule and meeting specification.
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 to the distribution organization.
Combining the jobs almost always results in one or the other simply not getting done. And the type of people who are good at one are rarely good at the other.
whole product manager is a product-marketing-manager-to-be.
But to fail to take it now is equally foolish, for every day that the enhancement list is in the hands of the original pioneers, the company risks making additional development commitments to unstrategic ends.
when compensation programs do discriminate—when they discourage the very behaviors that ought to be rewarded, or vice versa—then organizations fail.
The key is to discriminate between account penetration and account development. The latter is a more predictable, less remarkable achievement.
