Author: Chasm Group

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Synopsis: Customer success is a broken promise in 95% of tech companies. CEOs, CROs and sales teams are generally preoccupied with chasing new logos, and scarce CSMs scramble to minimize churn and secure upsells. Frequently, they have no idea about their customer’s business objectives or success criteria. In a downturn… Continue reading Why Now’s the Time to Get Customer Success Right

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC How can anyone fail to have noticed the sudden prominence of videoconferencing app Zoom since the outbreak of the Coronavirus crisis? Despite facing established competitors like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook in consumer video-calling and Cisco and Google in videoconferencing at work, Zoom appears to have literally zoomed to the top… Continue reading Zoom – The Latest Product to Become a Verb

Case Study – The rapid rise of mobile banking startup Clairmail   By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC   Chasm crossing is not the end, but rather the beginning, of mainstream market development.” “Entering the mainstream market is an act of burglary, of breaking and entering, of deception, often even of stealth.” “To become a… Continue reading The Scaleup Journey: Crossing the Chasm in Style

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Among the thirty founder-CEOs of tech scaleups with whom I have worked over the past year or so, I’ve noticed that a disturbingly high percentage are experiencing or exhibiting signs of burnout, sufficient in some cases to place the continued growth of their respective businesses at serious risk. The companies… Continue reading The Scaleup Journey: Dealing with Founder-CEO Burnout

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC “To win a race, the swiftness of a dart Availeth not without a timely start. The hare and tortoise are my witnesses. Said tortoise to the swiftest thing that is, “I’ll bet that you’ll not reach, so soon as I The tree on yonder hill we spy… The race is… Continue reading UK vs US Tech: Can the Tortoise Ever Catch the Hare?

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC One Problem to Avoid at All Costs: Premature Scaling Today there is an abundance of incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and VC firms to help founding teams avoid the many risks of failure and take full advantage of their opportunities as they seek to get their startup business successfully off the… Continue reading Scaling Up is Hard to Do

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Picture the following customer success story. In parallel, note the various dimensions in which the relationship between vendor and customer expands. Further down, I summarize the six possible dimensions in which you may be able to expand each of your major customer relationships and, accordingly, the annual contract value of… Continue reading The Six Dimensions for Expanding Customer Engagement and TCV

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC One story of visionary buying behavior that I think still sums up the difference between how visionaries behave when responding to disruptive innovations is the tale of how Dell Computer changed the competitive dynamics in the ultra-competitive PC market in the mid-90s (*), and more specifically how Dell’s competitors failed… Continue reading Visionaries are from Mars, Pragmatists are from Venus

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Altogether now: Applications come first, platform comes second. Not the other way around! In your marketing, on your website, or in front of customers, “platform” is practically a suicidal term until customers have shown that they care about what your product or service and the architecture behind it can do… Continue reading Nobody Cares About Your “Platform” Till They Know What Real Problems It Solves

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Ever since the advent of cheap and plentiful capital following the global financial crisis, a new business model has gradually muscled its way to the forefront, in many cases supplanting the conventional B2C — business to consumer — model and co-existing alongside the B2B — business to business — business… Continue reading Bad News! The VC2C Business Model is at Breaking Point