As you rollout your ground-breaking new product, technology, or disruptive offering, Innovators and Early Adopters will make small purchases. You’ll enjoy rapid success with some easy sales.
When you run out of Innovators and Early Adopters, things change – for the worse! Prospects appear dubious, cautious, and erect substantial obstacles to sales. They want increasingly complex and expensive forms of proof.
The “Let us show you how the technology works” demo no longer resonates. That’s your first key indication that you’re in the Chasm! Both Early and Late Majority prospects are skeptical and require deeper, longer, and sometimes painfully detailed demos. Next, they’ll demand POCs, POVs, and deeper forms of evaluation and proof.
Early Majority prospects also seek validation of your product in use by customers similar to themselves. They need to talk with happy reference customers.
You need to have good, effective references that align with your Early Majority prospects. This is one of the biggest challenges in crossing the Chasm: Early Majority prospects want to talk with their peers who are likewise in the Early Majority! This is clearly an oxymoronic problem, and many organizations solve it by positioning their initial Early Adopter customers as members of the Early Majority. (Obi-Wan Salesperson: “These are not the references you seek…,” spoken with the appropriate accompanying hand motion.)
Next, where Early Adopter and Innovator purchases were made by individuals or very small groups, you find that larger buying committees are becoming the norm. That’s another indication of being in the Chasm.
Very intriguingly, Innovators and Early Adopters are captured by the vision of what’s possible. Innovators, in particular, can take a set of features and synthesize on their own the problems these features can address and the solutions that are possible. This is a key attribute that differentiates this category from Majority prospects, in particular. This is why Vision Generation demos are the delightfully effective starting point for your selling journey and their buying journey.
I love to ask people if they know anyone who purchased an iPad when it was first released. Invariably, a colleague is mentioned. I ask, “Did your colleague have a plan as to how they expected to use their new iPad?” The consistent response was, “No, they just thought it was amazingly cool!”
If you connected with these Innovators a few weeks later, they would report how their new iPads were solving a pile of problems, many of which were previously unknown or unaddressed. Innovators synthesize solutions on their own; Early Majority prospects need you to paint pictures of both the problems and the solutions. Their comparative lack of vision is another indicator of residing in the Chasm.
(You can find details on Vision Generation Demos in Chapter 11 of the Third Edition of Great Demo!)
And you can find Part 1 and 2 here!
