Meet the Expert
Andrew Salzman
Partner, The Chasm Group LLC
- Senior operating executive and global marketing leader for 30 years at companies in transition, including Kodak, Compaq, Siebel Systems, others in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
- Consultant for past 3+ years working with Geoffrey Moore, leading tech market strategy theorist ("Crossing the Chasm"), with clients at emerging, fast-growth, and large tech-based enterprises including LinkedIn, Kofax and others.
- Has specialized in growth strategies and plans for technology-based companies, including P&G, Kodak, Masterfoods, Compaq, Siebel, IRI, Saba, and now Chasm Group.
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Driving Transitional Growth for Tech-Based Businesses
Partner, The Chasm Group LLC
Common Problems
- Your startup company is having difficulty determining market fit.
- It's often difficult for startup companies that are just entering the market to determine their best strategy and fit.
- Who is the best buyer for your company to target?
- What's the best way for your company to test the product to make sure it's a good fit?
- How can your company develop an initial base of customers?
- When should your company turn on the engine for sales and marketing?
- Who is the best buyer for your company to target?
- Your company is just not keeping pace with the market.
- The market's growing quickly but your company has reached a plateau, and then leveled off. Your board and investors are clamoring for more growth, but you're stuck. You know you need to re-think your strategy, but you aren't sure exactly how to do that.
- What new directions can your company take?
- What added markets could you pursue?
- Are there opportunities your company is just not seeing?
- Could you do a better job of focusing your technology, resources, products, sales, marketing, service?
- What new directions can your company take?
- Your company is experiencing flat growth in maturing markets and needs to identify and fulfill new revenue opportunities.
- How can your company create a new, exciting story to take to the investors as part of a Series B or C round?
How do you go about winning a beachhead in a new market segment or niche outside your core? For example, maybe your company is selling smart thermostats to consumers but you can sell that energy management data to utility firms, or perhaps you expand from easy to use home thermostats to easy to use smoke detectors? Nest Labs did that. So how do you open the aperture to expand your product line?
Many companies get so locked into the day-to-day details of running a business that they fail to take time to look at the bigger picture. Many opportunities for growth may be staring you right in the face, but you need to shift your perspective in order to see them. - Your company has no system of engagement with its customers.
- The digital revolution and advent of social media have completely altered customer expectations.
It has forever changed the way companies communicate with their customers, the way products are designed and built, and the way they are sold. Consumers and customers demand products built for audiences of one, and they want to be able to communicate and collaborate with you in real time. There is a new market reality where engagement with the customer is expected. Are you ready?
Companies are using the Internet to build a far more complete customer experience that extends and personalizes the company's relationship with the customer and cements the customer's loyalty towards the company.
In technology-based businesses, the "consumerization of IT" is playing out in B2B environments and is driving more engagement and interaction, more market-driven product design, more innovation, and a greater focus on the customer's desired business outcomes than ever before. - Old-school marketing structures and operating models still persist with a dearth of cross-department collaboration and shared accountability.
- Traditionally, the marketing team is set up as a set of traditional functional siloes built for marketing needs, circa 1975. Despite the volume of information about how to engage and win customers, most marketing divisions continue to think traditionally. Corporate communications, branding, PR, events, demand generation, and analyst relations all sum up to two basic functions – generate awareness and interest or generate sales leads.
People naturally resist change, however, so reinventing the organizational model to fulfill today's marketing demands requires a leap of faith. As always, marketing still starts with a deep knowledge of the customer, but the roles of branding and demand generation must now extend across the entire organization through partnerships with sales, products, service and the executive suite.
Marketing leaders have a new role to play – one in which they serve as the glue in bringing all functional groups into the mix to share a central vision, strategy, set of priorities, and common set of metrics. It's important to build an organization where all groups are fully cognizant of the interdependencies. Even within a marketing division these days, there are new categories that must be aligned. You have the data analysts and the data scientists who are looking at reams of market and customer data to figure out not only what customers are buying, but why they’re buying it, who they’re buying it from, and why they’re buying it from them versus you. - Your company claims to want innovation, but has difficulty translating ideas into material businesses.
- Large companies often have the vision for where the next innovation is going to come from but they can’t figure out how to nurture it. Microsoft had the capabilities to do tablets long before Apple, but it had poor operational processes in place to nurture a new idea demanding different organizational structures and performance metrics.
Big public companies tend to focus almost 100 percent on growing their core business and don't want to do anything to cannibalize that. They are so focused on satisfying existing customers that they struggle to understand how to develop what could be their future growth drivers. Kodak had this innovator's dilemma problem. They could see the world going digital but 95 percent of their revenue and profit came from film, paper and chemicals, so how could they destroy that in order to build what would be a competitive new revenue stream? - Your company confuses operational planning with strategic planning.
- A proper strategic plan involves studying the market, the category, the competitors, the customers, geopolitical and macroeconomic factors at play, and how they ultimately will influence not only your core business, but what your potential future business could be.
This may have a bearing on what you've got in the lab. If there are 15 interesting things coming out of R&D, but you can only pick three, there needs to be an empirical reasoning structure to identify those three and a willingness to focus the right resources for bringing those to fruition before you ever even think about the operating plan.
If the strategic plan is written in April and the operating plan is written in July or August, you’re likely to have a better chance of identifying and creating the next new thing or being able to protect yourself against a future threat on the horizon.
Unfortunately, most so-called "strategic planning" starts with CEO goal-setting, a CFO review of last year’s numbers, and goal setting driven by "last year x 5 percent" thinking. Functional leaders are then told: “Build me a plan, here’s your budget, here are your goals, and they’re five percent above last year.” The functional leaders all say, “I can’t make that plan with current resources,” and top management says, “Figure it out.” Such planning leads to unrealistic goals and misaligned execution across the company.
Absent a sound strategy plan and the completion of the operating plan in January, the result of this wheel spinning is a thick PowerPoint or report that's distributed to the executive management team to gather dust on a shelf. More often than not, the strategy and operational planning work is treated as a box to be checked off because that's what purportedly constitutes proper management practice.
Driving Transitional Growth for Tech-Based Businesses:
Common Problems
Expert Topic