---
product_id: 118308679
title: "Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers"
price: "€ 8.20"
currency: EUR
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reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.sk/products/118308679-crossing-the-chasm-marketing-and-selling-technology-projects-to-mainstream
store_origin: SK
region: Slovakia
---

# Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers

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desertcart.com: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers (Audible Audio Edition): Geoffrey A. Moore, Mike Chamberlain, Harper Business: Audible Books & Originals

Review: Awesome book - This book is about market segmentation and the challenge of retargeting a business from early adopters to mainstream buyers. I have seen businesses fail because of insufficient market segmentation, including my own business. One company I once worked for had about 30 software products (acquired through mergers) and perhaps $100M/year in revenue, but did not distinguish in its catalogs, presentation, or sales force training, between mainstream products and experimental (buggy) early adopter products. Within a year they had failed. If they understood this book they would still be around. If I had read this book ten years earlier I would be much wealthier than I am today. The book is packed with examples, strategies, tactics and marketing insights which are not easily sumarized in a brief review. It is a pleasure to read and will withstand several re-readings. I highly recommend it to any businessperson, engineer, entrepreneur or investor.
Review: two good points, but a longwinded book - Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content. The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading. You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education. Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books.

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![Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/718nO8yR8TL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Awesome book
*by C***N on February 18, 2010*

This book is about market segmentation and the challenge of retargeting a business from early adopters to mainstream buyers. I have seen businesses fail because of insufficient market segmentation, including my own business. One company I once worked for had about 30 software products (acquired through mergers) and perhaps $100M/year in revenue, but did not distinguish in its catalogs, presentation, or sales force training, between mainstream products and experimental (buggy) early adopter products. Within a year they had failed. If they understood this book they would still be around. If I had read this book ten years earlier I would be much wealthier than I am today. The book is packed with examples, strategies, tactics and marketing insights which are not easily sumarized in a brief review. It is a pleasure to read and will withstand several re-readings. I highly recommend it to any businessperson, engineer, entrepreneur or investor.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ two good points, but a longwinded book
*by B***R on February 19, 2002*

Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content. The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading. You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education. Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Even if you think you know it, you should read it
*by S***P on May 12, 2013*

I had heard of this book so many times during my MBA and startup days so I always wanted to read it. But because this book is so highly quoted, I had also read various summaries and articles written around it. Reading these gave me the feeling that I know enough of what this book is all about and so perhaps I can give it a skip. Turns out I was wrong. No matter how much you think you know it, this book is still a goldmine. In spite of knowing the basics of diffusion curve and the way innovation spreads, I still got to learn many new things. Just to highlight a few: - Why do products with better features don't always end up winning the market? - What are the peculiarities of users in each segment of diffusion curve? - Difference between a sales driven and a market driven company and which one you should be? - The importance of hitting the right pain point and choosing the right niche Certain not so good things about the book: - Most examples are bit dated as this book was written quite sometime ago so young folks might not have heard of these companies - Certain parts of the book specially the sales strategy seem to be applicable more to the B2B businesses and less for B2C type consumer internet businesses - Also certain portions of the book, specially the last chapter or so, seems like a little outdated in present context of 2013 Nonetheless, overall this book is a must recommend for all entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts and product managers. It should be a part of your library as there will be times when you will have to look back and reference certain parts of it.

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*Last updated: 2026-02-28*