Crossing the Chasm: early customers buy change, mainstream customers buy stability

In 1991 Geoffrey Moore wrote that between visionary customers and pragmatic customers lies a large chasm that almost everyone overlooks. More than thirty years later, many FDE teams still fall straight into it. They deploy successfully for the first customer, carry the same approach over to the second, and find that it does not work.

The cause is not the code. According to Moore, the two groups buy different things, so they need to be deployed differently. If you are an FDE at a startup moving from a handful of pilot customers to broader sales, this book helps you name the problem you are facing.

A marketing book that FDEs should read as an operations manual

The edition to read is the third, Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, published by Harper Business on 28 January 2014.

Moore’s official site describes the book as a strategy for closing the gap between visionary early adopters and the pragmatic majority. It is written for people in marketing and sales. Yet its three most important ideas land squarely on the work FDEs do every day at customer sites.

Idea one: the first customer buys change

Moore draws a sharp line between the two groups. Visionary customers buy change, while the early majority, in his words, want to improve productivity for the operations they already run. For the first group, a deployment is a transformation project. For the second, it has to be an evolutionary step that causes no disruption.

Imagine deploying a document-processing agent for two logistics companies. Company A has an operations director who wants to rebuild the whole process.

He accepts changes to data-entry forms, has staff learn a new tool and tolerates errors for the first three weeks. Company B only wants its accounting team to spend two fewer hours a day on data entry, while its ERP system and approval process stay exactly as they are.

If you take A’s plan to B, proposing to “redesign the process”, B will read it as risk. So in discovery, ask customers what they want to change and what must not be touched under any circumstances. The answer to the second question tells you which group you are dealing with.

Idea two: the whole product is the FDE’s job

Moore writes that pragmatist customers evaluate and buy the whole product, not the core technology. Innovators and early adopters are usually willing to assemble the missing pieces themselves. The early majority are not.

This explains why the first customer happily accepts a deployment held together by manual scripts, while a mainstream customer sees the same thing as an unfinished product.

Back to the example: at Company A, the customer’s own IT team wrote the ERP connector and trained the staff. At Company B nobody will do that, so the connector, training materials and support process must be ready before you arrive.

The first thing to do is write down everything the early customer did for you. That list is the draft whole product for the next customer.

It is also worth putting on a CV. A line such as “turned the ERP connector written by the first customer’s IT team into a ready-made installation step for later customers” shows employers that you think about product, not just write code to order.

Idea three: one problem, one market, then expand

Moore advises focusing on one customer segment at a time and using each success as a springboard to the next. Concretely, build a complete solution for one problem in a single market before expanding. This is the beachhead, or bowling alley, strategy.

A common FDE mistake runs directly against this advice. Imagine three logistics customers: the first asks for customs document processing, the second for warehouse management, the third for invoice reconciliation.

Say yes to all three, and six months later you have three half-built features, none complete enough to sell to a pragmatist customer.

Working in Moore’s spirit takes four steps. First, gather every request from customers in the same industry into one table. Next, pick the problem that appears across the most customers, say customs documents.

Then make that part truly complete: a connector, training materials and a support process, the whole product in the sense of idea two. Only when the logistics customers are using it reliably do you use that success as a springboard into warehousing or another industry.

The hardest step is saying “not yet” to the second and third requests. An FDE who can explain to a customer why their request is in the queue, and give a concrete timeline, earns more trust from the product team than one who accepts every request.

Is the chasm real?

The chasm concept has its critics. Everett Rogers, who developed diffusion theory, observed that earlier research does not support the idea of a chasm between groups of technology adopters. So use the book as a diagnostic lens, not a law.

The third edition covers the technology adoption life cycle, how to choose a beachhead segment, how to build the whole product with partners and how to position against competitors.

FDEs should read the whole-product and beachhead sections first, because that is where the book touches deployment directly. Read the life-cycle section afterwards for the theoretical framework; the positioning section is more useful for anyone about to move into solutions or product.

The book was first published in 1991 and revised in 1999 and 2014, so its examples are no longer fresh. The framework still holds.

Next time a deployment that ran smoothly at the first customer is suddenly dismissed by the second as “not ready”, the product may well be fine. More likely, you have just stepped into a different customer group, and they need to be deployed differently.