Geoffrey Moore: recommendation

Transcript context

…In fact, if there's a total in the model of the technology adoption lifecycle that we organize this all around, there's actually four, I call them, inflection points. The first one we call the early market. That's the one we were talking... That's the visionaries and the technology enthusiasts. They are as excited about you as you are. I mean, they want the demo. They want to see the vision. They're exciting. And the key to that market is to have an executive sponsor who has enough clout to essentially fund this thing, because there's no budget for you. So they've got to create the funding, and then drive the organization to go all the way to bright. They're not that many visionary customers, but there's always one or two. The reason why it's so important to work with a marquee customer then is you... Look, nobody's ever heard of you, and if they've never heard of your customer, I don't care how amazing the win is. Nobody's going to hear about it. So it's really important you did it with Apple, or you did it with Verizon, or you did it with Mercedes, somebody that people have heard. So that's number one, and that's a project model. Even if what you sell is a product, those early mark... Every one of them is kind of a snowflake. It needs a ton of special services. There's no ecosystem of partners to support you, so you throw a bunch of extra labor at it. You do whatever, because you got to make them successful. So you'll do whatever it takes. Okay, very cool. Got my marquee client, not scalable business, I mean, obviously. So then the second one is the Crossing the Chasm playbook. That's the one that organizes around the problem. The good news is those customers are open to hearing from someone new, because they've already talked to everybody they already know, and the problem is still... It's not that it's unsolved. It's being solved in a crummy way and, by the way, in a deteriorating crummy way. So it's getting actually worse. So there's pressure for them to act. This is where you go from the project model to the solution model, and as a vendor, you over commit to their problem. From the very beginning, you talk to them. They don't want to talk to you about you. They want to talk to you about them, and you need to ask them probing questions about them. Just like going to a doctor, you don't want the doctor to come and say, "Hey, can I show you a movie of the operation I just did? I want to give you a demo. You mind if I give you a demo?" It's like, "No. What I would like to do is talk to you about this pain I have in my side." And then when the doctor asks you good questions about it, you go, "Ah, this is a good doctor. I'm going to trust this." So that's the whole point about that. Again, that scales a lot more than a project business, but it only scales up to the limit of the target segment. So we had this bowling alley model of extending. You could go to a second segment, a third segment if it was adjacent. han a project business, but it only scales up to the limit of the target segment. So we had this bowling alley model of extending. You could go to a second segment, a third segment if it was adjacent. Adjacent means either it's the same customer with a different use case, or it's the same use case in a different customer base, because the one case, you use your customer references. The other case, you use your partners, because the partners who built the one use case will say, "Well, we got another segment that we work with. Let's bring you into that segment too." So that can take a company from, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars in the bowling alley. And in specialized industries like computer-rated design or things like that, you can actually go to a billion dollars or higher. But with most other categories, at some point, you have this third inflection point, which is it's when people go, "Well, wait a minute, wifi isn't just for financial analysts, or isn't just for... Wifi is for everybody." So instead of saying, "We believe what you believe," which we're not there anymore. And these people aren't even really saying, "We need what you have." What they're saying is, "We want what they have. This is really cool. I want what they have," and that creates what we call the tornado. That's when people... This is when you do want sales coverage, and you do want to go broad, and you do want to have a standard product. Basically, you want to capture as much market share as you can. There's a whole playbook around doing that, which was in a book called Inside the Tornado. And then the last one, which is actually becoming much more important in this century is called Main Street, but Main Street where products have become commoditized, services become the new place of innovation. We've had taxis for 100 years, but Uber is an incredibly valuable thing. You convert the product to the service, and how do you revolutionize services? That's a situation where now people are saying, "Look, I don't want to own the product. I don't want to own it." Well, kids, "I don't want to own a car. I just want to call Uber. It's convenient." So anyway, those are the four models, and Crossing the Chasm was about that second one. Amazing. You touched on so many things that I want to talk about. I definitely want to dive into the bowling alley metaphor and strategy there. But to close the loop on this target audience to start with initially. First of all, you have this awesome bonfire analogy that I think might be useful to share. Then along that, is there any example or an example or two you could share of just someone that did that really well of picking a really good initial target?…

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