We love to be the leader. We grow up being taught that the view from behind is a nasty one. We spend a lot of our energy in this business trying to position ourselves as the leader.

Established companies do the same exact thing, by the way, but they won’t necessarily die because of it. Startups very well may.

Tech companies, perhaps more than all others, absolutely love to be able to claim that they lead the pack. Perhaps because it’s so hard to build a tech product that will appease our egos if we feel like ours truly is better at something than the other guys’. The problem is that people don’t buy leading tech. They wait. They follow or they lag. Hell, we spend a ton of money trying to have Gartner put us in the top right of the magic quadrant–to show we are visionary leaders. The problem is no one with money cares about visionary leaders until after they have already bought from them.

There are three types of customers – Leaders, Followers, and Laggards. The leader is the one out front, who tests the limits of their own organisations and implements new technologies and processes to try to drive business value. Everyone who sells products wants to position themselves directly at this slice of the market. The problem is, this is not a profitable slice. This is a death march. The only ones who make money in this area of the market are the ones who are anointed. There is no room for anyone else. So stop wasting your time.  You come in first in this slice or you don’t come in at all. For example, we recently did a ton of research on server virtualisation adopters, across a wide spectrum of functional areas (storage, server, network, security, etc.). We then categorised the market into the three aforementioned buckets. We found about 25% of enterprises were “leaders” when it comes to server virtualisation–which sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. To be a leader in this area, you had to have deployed virtualisation to at least 40% of your environment.

Tech companies market to the leading edge buyer, but I would argue that is the worst place to market. Why? Because by default those companies have already made their decisions. They are going to accelerate adoption of decisions already made. Spending any time or money trying to undo that decision, at this stage, is futile. Game over.

Most companies position and message to the leading edge buyer wrongly–at the expense of the followers and laggards. In the virtualisation world, for example, all of the money in the next five years will come from followers and laggards. VMware already owns the leaders, but the followers and laggards are still up for grabs. They represent 75% of the market! They will spend 90% of the money. The leaders will grow their deployments at 20%. The followers will grow at more than 50%. So you want to try to turn around a decision already made because your stuff is “better” versus spending your time and energy intersecting a bigger, faster moving market where those decisions have yet to be made? Lunacy, but it’s exactly what happens.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most influential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www.thebiggertruth.com