are you in the chasm?

At a recent management meeting, a client of mine (who I respect greatly) accurately challenged us to reflect on our year to date revenue achievement.  Things are not abysmal at this company (their revenues are flat, year to date, to their 2008 revenues) but they are not achieving any growth.  Of course, the immediate response was that the pipeline imploded due to the recession and we are seeing those effects play out in the first half of the year.  And there is the rub.  At this point he asked:

what if it is not the recession … what if we are in the chasm?

The chasm?  For those of us old enough, Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm was a must read for anyone in high-tech in 1998 and beyond.  It brought forward the idea of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle and more importantly the concept of “the Chasm” - the gap between an early market dominated by a few visionary customers and a main stream market dominated by a large block of customers who are fundamentally pragmatists in nature.  Two very different groups of customers with very different habits.  A successful crossing of the chasm brought untold fortune while a failure was the loss of yet another great start-up or to become a company content in itself to just make payroll.

The book was a seminal offering in how to cross the chasm through marketing and selling strategies and to be fair, although the examples are somewhat outdated, the concepts are still as applicable today as they were then.

It’s scary to acknowledge that you are in the chasm for two reasons.

First, you know that making a marketing and communication transition is going to be excruciatingly awkward because you must adopt new strategies just at the time you’ve become most comfortable with the old ones (as an example, my clients company is currently meeting and exceeding all their lead generation metrics).

Second, you are knowingly going to expose your company to a level of vulnerability and risk from competitors as you make the transition and therefore everyone at the company must understand the sense of urgency required to make the transition and focus on making as few mistakes as possible.  That’s a tall order in an environment of entitlement, complacency and life with the Millennials/iGeneration (which my client is experiencing).

As my client has strong leadership skills we banded together as a team and decided to embrace the change.

However, the point of this post was not to review Moore’s theories and how they applied to my client but to acknowledge that it is far too easy to just toss off our lack of success due to recessionary pressures.   Sure, that comes into play to some extent but is that really all that is going on?  Bad times force a level of introspection but the lazy immediately go to the obvious.  So metaphorically I ask you:

are you in the chasm?

Maybe you’re not.  Maybe your start-up is so new that you are just trying to get traction with the early adopters (perhaps you’re thinking you’d like to just get to the chasm!).  But the point is here we are discussing in terms of a management book from the ’90’s different reasons other than the recession.  We are innovators.  Think outside the box when it comes to problems too!!  The recession occurred but it occurred for everyone - which levels the playing field.  So, removing that excuse, what impacted you?