B2B Go-to-Market Playbooks and the Technology Adoption Life Cycle

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Life-cycle go-to-market has been the focus of much of my life’s work, and I had the opportunity to recap that experience at a recent chalk talk at the HackerDoJo in Mountain View. It turned out that most of what I had to say was captured on a single slide. For readers over the age of X, this may be familiar territory; for those under the age of Y, it may prove new.

This framework highlights four different go-to-market playbooks, each optimized for a different stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. The two key takeaways are:

1. The playbook that creates success in any given stage will underperform at any of the other three, and
2. The playbooks do not blend; instead, they actually undercut each other when combined.

Thus, the number one job of the go-to-market strategy-setting leader is to get the entire team aligned around one, and only one, playbook. 

Now, full disclosure, because different segments of the market can be in different phases of the life cycle, a go-to-market organization can be running more than one play at the same time. What they must not do is run more than one at the same time in the same place!

The Early Market Playbook

The focus of this play is to engage with a visionary customer executive who wants to leverage disruptive technology to change the world. Because your technology has yet to be adopted, the category does not yet exist, and thus there is no budget for your product. As a result, it must be funded as a project, and the customer executive has to be senior enough to have the clout to extract the necessary funds from the enterprise’s existing resource pool. Your job is to inspire that executive, hence the emphasis on thought leadership marketing to connect your breakthrough technology to their compelling business vision. It makes for a wild ride, to be sure, but when successful, it puts your company on the map as the company that did what!?!? There still is no market, there still is no budget, but there is buzz, and that buzz is associated with you, provided, that is, that your target customer is a marquee brand that people look up to. For Salesforce in its early days, this was Merrill Lynch. For Amazon Web Services in its early days, this was the CIA. For OpenAI recently, this was Microsoft.

The Bowling Alley Playbook

This is the playbook described in Crossing the Chasm. Its focus is to engage with a pragmatic business manager who is responsible for a deteriorating business process that is causing increasing problems for their enterprise, and thus, urgently needs a fix. All the conventional approaches have been found wanting, and so this prospect is open to a disruptive approach, but only if it commits to solving its specific problem. There is budget to spend here although at present it is allocated to traditional approaches. As a result, the sales cycle begins with winning the right to redirect that spend. Sales success depends on your company demonstrating a deep understanding of the problem state followed by a clear explanation of why your technology can succeed where traditional approaches fail. Implementation success depends on bringing together a team that can solve the problem end to end, leveraging domain expertise with technological leverage, to deliver what Ted Levitt taught us to call the whole product (the minimum set of products and services needed to eliminate the problem). From a market development strategy point of view, the key is to focus on a single use case in a single industry in a single geography, the goal being to develop a congregation of successful companies that will serve as a reference base as well as a loyal customer base. That is how desktop publishing helped give birth to the Mac Faithful.

The Tornado Playbook

This is the playbook that drives The Gorilla Game, a market share landgrab that catapults a single company to stratospheric valuation, dragging a cohort of close contenders in its wake, resulting in the gigantic market caps that motivate early-stage venture capital investing. It is triggered by a tipping point in the adoption life cycle when pragmatic customers' resistance to early adoption is overcome by their fear of missing out. In a flash, the new paradigm becomes the new mandate—we must have mobile apps, we must transition to cloud computing, we must procure software as a service. Budgets sprout up everywhere like mushrooms, and they are there for the picking. All this rewards a “Just win, baby” approach to go-to-market, characterized by as broad a coverage model as possible combined with highly disciplined sales tactics. RFPs (Requests for Proposals) are prevalent, driving both pilot projects and bake-offs, with marketing focusing primarily on competitive differentiation and pricing discounts. Importantly, whichever vendor wins the first pick becomes that customer’s incumbent, giving it privileged access to future purchases. Just as importantly, if one company becomes the clear market share leader, then the ecosystem of supporting companies rallies around it, elevating its competitive advantage to gorilla status.

The Main Street Playbook

This is the playbook that drives sustained earnings growth in markets that have adopted the new technology and now seek to maintain it over as long a useful lifetime as possible. At this stage, customers prefer to work with their incumbent vendors and over time to consolidate around a smaller set of integrated suites. These suites serve as platforms for ongoing innovations that are sustaining rather than disruptive, something that bores visionaries but appeals greatly to pragmatists and even more so to conservatives. In the land-and-expand as-a-service business model, we are in the expansion phase, and the growth goal is to cross-sell and up-sell new service transactions, and the earnings goal is to maximize renewals and minimize attrition. Telemetry about user adoption and feature usage is mission-critical to this effort, enabling both account managers as well as the software itself to guide the customer’s buying decisions. Product-led growth supported by self-service transactions is mission-critical for consumer applications and other user-driven offers. For enterprise sales, packaging up sets of requirements and aligning with the customer’s procurement cycle calls for the kind of account management we used to call farming and now call customer success.

Final Takeaway

Each of these playbooks makes distinctly different demands of the marketing, sales, and services teams running the go-to-market effort. People talented at one type of play may struggle with another. Our tendency as human beings is to want to stick with what we are good at, so it is usually wise to empower a new leader whenever you change playbooks. 

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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