Read the classics (but don’t read too much!)

Some books are timeless!

Over the years, I’ve run into several books that I found very helpful in making me understand the technical sales and marketing field. A couple of these are real standounts, so I call them “classics”:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

Originally published in 1991 and now on it’s third edition, I devoured this book when it first came out (an “early adopter” 😀). It was basically the “bible” internally for the company I was working at during that time, and I got to watch everything that the book talks about play out right at work. The full title of the book is Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers.

The book stems from a model called diffusion of innovations created by Everett Rogers, which attempts to characterize how ideas and technology spread. It point to several categories of “adopter” over the product or idea lifecycle:

Moore took this idea further by arguing that there is a “chasm” between early and mainstream markets. This chasm, or adoption gap, represents an enormous challenge to technical companies, particulary when their technologies could be considered “disruptive” (forcing a change of behavior in the customer):

As detailed in a past blog post, I have always worked at small companies, all of whom were attempting to cross the chasm. In all honesty, only one or two of these companies actually made it across the chasm, but that is normal; very few technology start-ups make it, that’s just a fact!

How to cross the chasm?

If you are looking for a singular answer here, you are out of luck! The book points out the importance of defining the target market (niche), understanding the whole product concept, properly positioning the product as a market leader in the niche, and choosing the correct distribution channel and pricing. So obviously, crossing the chasm is more of a framework to work with, that will have completely specific implementations based on the product, market and positioning.

The strategy further involves focusing on a single group of customers at a time, using network effects to have each group of customers become the base for the next. A lot can be said for the importance of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) in the early adopter stage being critical to growth. The overall object is to move from being just an “innovative new product” to becoming a “de-facto standard”, while maintaining a laser focus.

My personal experience has been that the first 3 steps: defining the niche, coming to a whole product vision, and positioning the product, are absolutely the most critical in determining success or failure. Far too many companies do only a cursory job of these steps before blindly releasing a new product, only to be stuck in the chasm. Eager technologists tend to incorrectly believe the old adage of “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”.

The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time

Written by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, and originally published in 1993, this book is admittedly now dated! It was written 11 year before Facebook was even founded, and 14 years before the iPhone came out! It even talks about using the fax machine (what is that? 😀), so yes, it is technologically in the dark ages. However, the basic concepts here are timeless for customer relationship management:

• The 80/20 rule: find the 20 percent of your customers who are the most loyal and offer the biggest opportunity for future profit.
• Interface with each customer. one at a time, with specific content that is appropriate for them.
• Continually nurture these relationships by supplying content they want through multiple media sources.
• To quote Seth Godin: “The One to One Future, took a simple truth—that it’s cheaper to keep an old customer than it is to get a new one—and articulated the entire field of customer relationship management. They showed that there are only four kinds of people (prospects, customers, loyal customers, and former customers) and that loyal customers are often happy to spend more money with you.”

Read anything by Seth Godin!

Since I just quoted Seth, I’ll just say that much about him. In fact, I think Seth is worthy of a separate blog post just on him!

But don’t read too much!

In the exploding information age, so much is available at our fingertips that is is easy to get overwhelmed! There’s a bazillion books out there on any topic imaginable (unfortunately, a lot of these are bot-written now!). There’s web sites, blogs, FAQs, newsletters, etc. It would be easy to educate yourself directly into analysis paralysis!

The fact of the matter is that you will learn the most by doing, not reading! You don’t have to become a marketing and sales guru/expert in order to succeed, only know enough from perhaps reading these classics, and more importantly, asking for help from people who have been through the process before. While it can be painful, mistakes teach us much more than successes. If we set reasonable goals and employ good metrics for measuring success, we can realize when we are going down the wrong path early, and make appropriate course corrections.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

• Albert Einstein