By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” – Winston Churchill, while working to form the United Nations after WWII “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define thetarget market and direct…
If You’re Not Fixing Someone’s Leaky Pipe, What Are You in Business for?
By Philip Lay, Senior Advisor, The Chasm Group LLC Tuning Your Strategy for Post-Covid Times “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” – Mario Cuomo, former three-term governor of New York State, 1983-94 “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d…
Why Now’s the Time to Get Customer Success Right
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,…
Zoom – The Latest Product to Become a Verb
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…
The Scaleup Journey: Crossing the Chasm in Style
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,…
The Scaleup Journey: Dealing with Founder-CEO Burnout
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…
UK vs US Tech: Can the Tortoise Ever Catch the Hare?
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…
Scaling Up is Hard to Do
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…
The Six Dimensions for Expanding Customer Engagement and TCV
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…
Visionaries are from Mars, Pragmatists are from Venus
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…