Should We Stay or Should We Go? – Part Two

Rich Stimbra March 8, 2023 No Comments

By Paul Wiefels, managing director & co-founder of Chasm Group, LLC   In the first installment we looked at three environmental questions as part of a framework to inform whether a change in strategic course is warranted. Now, we examine the internal contexts for strategy change, with a particular view to the inertial factors that can hinder or prevent success. First, ask where and what are the sources of organizational inertia. At the risk of generalizing a bit, most businesses lean to being either customer-centric or operations-centric. Each model is the basic source of how the business creates and conveys value. They are fit for purpose. One is not inherently “better” than the other. The customer-centric organization is optimized for pursuing and managing relatively low-volume, high-complexity systems linked for example to B2B software applications, biotech solutions, outsourced or professional services, and so on. The operation-centric organization, by contrast, operates best where products or services are delivered at significant scale through high-volume transactions, e.g., consumables, B2C apps, supply chain services and the like. Think of these as businesses with lots of moving parts. This does not imply that you are one thing and thus not the other. Rather, think “handedness.” We

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Should We Stay or Should We Go? – Part One

Rich Stimbra February 21, 2023 No Comments

By Paul Wiefels, managing director & co-founder of Chasm Group, LLC   A new year brings with it fundamental questions for organizations: Do we stay the course, adjust it, or change it significantly? Staying the course is relatively easy when compared to changing it. Change of any sort represents uncertainty, risk, overcoming inertia. Teams can get stuck figuring out where and how to start, what to consider, what’s of primary versus secondary importance and so on—potentially resulting in a lot of wasted effort. Or they engage in their “usual process” which can seem rote or overly quantitative. We prefer a practical, efficient framework comprised of a set of questions that guide leadership teams through a systematic review of the elements that both reflect and create, value. This supports a structured inquiry to inform what organizations can do—at any point—to improve their overall performance and competitive standing. The goal is to answer the question “Do we need to change our strategy? And if so how, and by how much?” This decision requires evaluating the output of the remaining questions in the framework. The first three questions that precede this question delve into the environmental contexts that will inform your answer. First,

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From On-Prem to SaaS – How Has Enterprise Sales Changed?

Rich Stimbra August 4, 2022 No Comments

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” (= The more things change, the more they remain the same.) – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849 As mentioned in my last blog post, “The Unique Mentality of Top Enterprise Sales Pros”, I recently interviewed a dozen experts on sales-related matters. This group included former CEOs, sales leaders, major-account sales reps, and a headhunter who specializes in hiring for enterprise sales roles including CROs. Besides discussing the special qualities and essential skills to look for in a world-class enterprise sales professional today, I asked them to comment on what’s changed in the enterprise sales business as a result of SaaS replacing on-prem as the predominant business model in software. The gist of this new post is this: While certain aspects related to customer adoption and buying behavior have undoubtedly evolved as have the corresponding strategies and tactics adopted by vendor sales teams, the essential dynamics of engaging with corporate and government customers have remained fairly similar. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, indeed. What’s Changed? As any veteran of tech in the 70s and 80s will recall, during those first few decades adoption of mainframe or minicomputer systems and the corresponding

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B2B SaaS – The Unique Mentality of Top Enterprise Sales Pros

Rich Stimbra June 22, 2022 No Comments

To understand what it takes to achieve exceptional performance in enterprise sales, as opposed to mid-market or SMB sales, I recently interviewed a dozen experts whom I regard as my informal “brains trust” on this topic. This group included three former CEOs; several former major-account execs at global players such as IBM, Cisco, and SAP; a former global sales MD on IBM’s executive leadership team, three B2B SaaS sales leaders, and a headhunter who specializes in hiring sales reps, sales managers, and CROs. Just to set the context, I asked each person to summarize what they perceived to have changed in the SaaS era with respect to the dynamics between vendors and enterprise customers. What’s Changed vs What’s Remained the Same To acknowledge what’s changed since SaaS began to replace the perpetual license business model, suffice to say that, yes, certain aspects of customer buying behavior have indeed changed – such as, for example, prospects getting further along in their consideration and evaluation due to the much greater availability of information online these days. From the vendor’s perspective, the customer engagement process has been de- and re-constructed to reflect a more explicit commitment to customer success and to accommodate more

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B2B Market Strategy – Figuring Out Your ICP Without Needing a PhD

Chasm Group May 11, 2022 No Comments

Over the past decade the startup/scaleup world has seen the emergence of a few key business concepts that quickly became three-letter acronyms, such as “PMF”, “MVP”, “PLG” and, more recently, “ICP”. Whereas PMF (Product-Market Fit) and MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – concepts popularized by Eric Ries in “The Lean Startup” – have helped startup founders and their teams to prove out their value propositions in more funding-friendly ways than happened previously, and whereas PLG (Product-Led Growth) has become code for designing consumer-friendly products to virtually sell themselves at lowest possible cost (i.e., without needing a sales team), the task of defining or refining your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) has recently become a recognized high priority for management teams in scaleups and even maturing tech companies. Without a tightly defined ICP, companies struggle with their competitive positioning, often coming across to prospective customers as trying to be all things to all people but great for no one. It also causes some to chase every possible opportunity yet struggle to fulfill any the needs of any one set of customers. Most such companies end up either missing their growth objectives through poorly qualified sales pipelines and/or high customer churn or, in the

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Without Astute Orchestration, No Platform Business Can be Sure of Success

Chasm Group February 4, 2022 No Comments

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC By now it is a well-known fact that successful platform businesses enjoy faster growth and (much) greater valuations than more conventional product companies. The most successful players today – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla (“AMAAT” for short) – have recently become trillion-dollar businesses. Two more recent players that arose from the ashes of the global financial crisis, AirBnB and Uber, are well on their way to similar status, with market caps at around the $100bn mark. An increasing number of B2B startups and scale-ups are aiming to emulate this success in different industry sectors including finance, energy, transportation and logistics, grocery retail, healthcare, agribusiness, and other sectors where they have identified inefficiencies that a digital platform could eliminate, alongside opportunities to create new value. Among other factors, successful platform business models leverage several key technologies of the past two decades: the internet, smartphone, GPS mapping and navigation, cloud computing, social networking (for identity verification), mobile payment systems, recommendation engines (for reviews and ratings), and big data algorithms to facilitate instant matchmaking of buyers and sellers. But building a successful platform business model requires much more than “just” leveraging modern digital technologies. It’s taken the

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Chasm Group Case Studies: Best Practices for Dutch Entrepreneurs

Chasm Group December 19, 2021 No Comments

The Oranjewoud Export Academy is a non-profit academy for entrepreneurs founded by entrepreneurs near Heerenveen, the Netherlands. As part of our engagement with Oranjewoud, we are pleased to share stories from Dutch entrepreneurs  on how they applied best practices from Chasm Group’s vast body of work documented in various books by our chairman emeritus, Geoffrey Moore. The first video shows how Jetzte Botma, former CEO of Kiestra Lab Automation (now owned by Becton Dickinson) decided the right Go-To-Market Strategy for his lab automation system that he and his team co-created with three customers from Denmark, Germany and the UK. His “aha” moment came when he read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. See for yourself how Jetze and his team applied the concepts for Kiestra. The second video shows how Gerrit Baarda, co-founder of ZiuZ, leveraged their technology “crown jewels” based on visual intelligence into various winning offers and value propositions to build market leadership positions with law enforcement agencies and pharmacies around the world. Gerrit and his CEO Bert Garlich applied the Four Zones concepts detailed in Moore’s book, Zone to Win, to ensure their company was set up for success. These videos are meant to inspire entrepreneurs by

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B2B SaaS – One Business Model, but Three Distinct Sales Motions

Chasm Group June 17, 2021 No Comments

By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Synopsis: Why are churn rates in B2B SaaS companies so high, and why is expansion in major accounts so haphazard? For whatever reason, management teams wildly over-invest in their Land strategies while dramatically under-investing in their Expand opportunities, as well as in the support and education efforts required to ensure that customers Renew. Perhaps part of the problem is the lack of suitable models and best practices for managing each of the three corresponding sales motions. I hope this article provides some pointers to help teams redress this chronic imbalance. I chose the image for this article, highlighting the different dynamics surrounding customer acquisition vs. customer expansion, because it points to a persistent, chronic misalignment in the vast majority of B2B tech companies today between management rhetoric and action. As I’ll demonstrate, renewal is another area where resources are mis-aligned and a different approach is required. CEOs, CMOs, CROs, and CCOs may talk a good game about investing in “customer success” but what their actions actually tell us is that they prioritize only what they believe to serve their own success in racking up new logos and new ARR. The provocation in the “not equal”

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How to Craft a World-Class Mission Statement

Chasm Group June 17, 2021 No Comments

In this interview with Tom Kippola, Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Chasm Group, he talks about how to craft a great mission statement for your company. Tom has helped hundreds of companies achieve strategic breakthroughs through his consulting work. And that work often starts with writing down the mission, sometimes for the very first time. Here are some of the key insights learned from the conversation (interview lightly edited for clarity). What is a company mission statement and why is it important to have one? A mission statement is the “why”. And the vision statement is the “what”. So, the mission is why a company exists other than to make money. The vision statement is what a company wants to become. A mission statement and a vision statement have to front-end the strategy because they inform the strategy, which informs the OKRs, which informs the initiatives, which informs the execution. So good mission and vision statements lead to good strategy and ultimately to results. It’s potentially a pretty daunting task to write these down if you’ve never done it as a team. Can you walk us through the process? How do you get started?  I use what I’ll call

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Tech competition is time-based: Why alignment and purpose are critical

Chasm Group June 17, 2021 No Comments

This content originally appeared on the Get Amplified Podcast and features Chasm Group Managing Director, Paul Wiefels. Paul Wiefels, is a Master of GoToMarket strategy for the Tech Industry, we caught up with him to find out what should tech companies be focusing on in 2021. Paul shares how there is such little difference between technology offerings from tech companies in the same category and how aligning and motivating the troops is the key to success. In a nutshell it is all about Speed to Market. This is a not to be missed episode.

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