13-Early stage-markets

What aspects of early stage-markets undermine the ability of marketing technology vendors to find or attract qualified buyers?

EARLY ADOPTERS

New markets consist of confused potential buyers who do not understand that they have a solvable problem.

Markets for transformational enterprise applications and SaaS solutions typically take huge investments of time and money to develop into a primary market.

Primary markets emerge from identifiable market-making steps of early adopters.

Vendors in early stage-market can speed market-making through the programmatic support of solutioneering teams that develop and socialize a funded change agenda for their organization.

Programmatic support of solutioneering teams entails the provisioning of innovation management tools and procedure templates for the full large-scale deployment of a workflow-automation system.

Linking the proven practices of innovation leadership to workflows of the marketing supply chains will accelerate market-making for this class of transformational solutions.

The figure below depicts a number of market-making milestones.

MARKET-MAKING DRIVERS

GISTICS’ research spanning 20 years reveals four things that speed the transition of breakthrough prototypes into replicable successes:

• Self-declared solutioneer teams comprise 3 to 6 specialists who coordinate projects amongst themselves.
• Documented user-case scenarios and user narratives explain how a technology or new system must fit within an existing social context.
• Phased solution architecture visually depicts the SOA business or service components that a CIO would use to identify which components already exist, which to build or buy next, and which components to outsource or secured from hosted service provider.
• Shared vocabularies and mental maps represent the structured conversations among buyers and sellers in real markets.

The transition from replicable successes to business model enhancements represents a major development phase of a new market: momentum. However, all four of the following must come together:

• Executive sponsored initiatives entail innovation projects that senior management considers strategic or, at least, potentially strategic.
• Activity-based cost savings and workflow models demonstrate the need for a new system as well as how short-term saving might fund new initiatives.
• Defensible business cases represent an investment analysis that justifies a purchase decision, adding sufficient support data and logic that even skeptical CFO’s will feel comfortable.
• Operational business plans summarize the total costs over three full years of operations. This includes supplemental investments keyed to process benchmarks and goal attainment.

The transition from business model enhancements to analyst-touted market categories represents the general recognition of a sustainable markets (if only for analyst reports and services!):

Endorsement of the market category by three or more analyst firms represents a major accomplishment. This will require a minimum of 25 referencible end-use enterprise accounts for commercial products.

Featured articles in magazines and consistent coverage by the top 20 to 40 thought-leader bloggers also represent a major accomplishment. Increasingly, thought-leader bloggers play a larger and larger role in generating industry coverage and buzz. Most thought-leader bloggers need just a few things: insider tips, primary research data that they can digest and interpret, and direct access to end-use customers.

Industry conference tracks means that conference managers believe that enough end-use executives will attend a featured track of sessions. Market-making leaders understand that a full conference track becomes a gift that keeps on giving; they pull out all stops to make sure that they get their contacts and prospects to one or two named conference partners and tracks.

Job titles and consulting practices using the name of the product category (VP, Digital Asset Management, Director, Marketing Operations, VP, Customer Engagement) provides the sustainable support for a new market: executives have bet their careers or next promotion on the category.

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