(Trying to) Cross the Chasm
It’s hard to believe, but, September is our three month anniversary of having a living, standing, breathing product on the market.
If you want to include the six months of Beta testing, well, then, obviously, we are in our ninth month — but, I don’t consider Beta testing to be “real” — Beta to me is the baby being born — it’s defenseless and needs parents, in other words, it really can’t stand on its own.
What have we learned since launching?
- Well, first, we aren’t going to be crossing “The Chasm” anytime soon (like, THIS MONTH!!!). We never had expectations to be over “The Chasm” in three months, but, some of you out there expected us to be — so, to set the record straight, it’s not going to happen this month.
- Second, we learned that early-adopters love our product and (fortunately or unfortunately) if they spend more than an hour using it, they turn into power-users. Which, again, is fortunate (yea for us!) and unfortunate (boo for us!) as they keep asking for even more and more (like the ability to send to a Spark Page to 1,000 prospects at the same time (which we just added to Spark) or for it to work with Intellinote by Broadsoft (which is now done!). As a young company, it is hard to ignore hundreds of power-users telling us all great stuff that we need to have in Spark (except for the capability for video recording — that’s not gonna happen).
- And lastly, that the capability to integrate with the many CRM systems out there should have been our #1 priority, not #2. Of course, we learned that in the first month and it is now our #1 priority — when we launched, we integrated with one CRM, now we integrate with three and more integrations are coming.
Of course, the product was built by sales professionals for sales professionals but, let’s be realistic, hundreds of users telling us what they want gives us strong validity compared to the three of us adding features that we “think” that you, the user, will like (btw — thank you for giving us all the feedback).
Here’s some fun facts about the past three months:
- 300 improvement requests: We have received over 300 product improvement suggestions from you
- 100 implemented!: We have implemented over 100 Spark improvements (this is a combination of both your suggestions and our continued improvements to Spark)
- 100+ 1 hour personal calls: We have done almost 100 one-hour video calls with sales professionals and/or companies around the world introducing them to Spark
We have a long way to go to bridge “The Chasm”, but, to us, we have already built the components needed to bridge it, making it even easier for us to continue to make sales professionals the world over heroes.
In conclusion, “The Chasm” is what every young company wants to cross and of course, the sooner the better. Most companies take years before it actually happens — but, for those of you who know us, we don’t want to wait years, because it will mean that there will be that many more sales reps who won’t have the power that Spark offers.
If you have NO idea what I’ve been talking about because you aren’t an Illumineto Spark user, click here to check us out. You wont’ regret it.
