This website uses cookies
Read our Privacy policy and Terms of use for more information.
Meet The Market is a publication and advisory practice for visionary leaders turning bold innovations into thriving businesses.
The Meet the Market newsletter will help you become a more strategic and creative strategist who is better equipped to solve the great many challenges in bringing a new innovation to market. Sign up for emails to get stories, strategies, thinking, and theory.
The Meet the Market advisory practice will help you and your team land more customers and expand your current customer base by supporting you with the qualitative insights, ICP development, messaging strategy, and product strategy you need to go from, “Yeah sounds good, maybe next quarter” to “How soon can we go live?”
I learned about this curse in high school art class. I had a grand vision to cover a wall of windows in beautiful colored bottles. When the morning sun rose it would shine through the bottles and illuminate the gallery in a dancing rainbow of blues and greens and browns and yellows. It would be breathtaking, I just knew it.
My Art Teacher wasn't buying it, at least not at first. She asked me if I was sure about the placement and the sparseness, she invited me to consider other options. We had a strong relationship built on mutual respect and she was one of my all-time favorite teachers, so I listened to her suggestions and heard her guidance as wisdom.
But in my youthful confidence, I rejected just about everything suggestion she made. I collected bottles, stripped their cap rings, and arranged them on the windowsills.
Then one morning at the end of the trimester, on the first bright dawn after the bottles were in place, my teacher saw the sun shine through the glass. She saw the lights glitter across the foyer, lighting up the galleries across the hall.
Then she did the coolest thing a teacher has ever done, which was to say, "Alli I'm really sorry I didn't trust your vision, I see what you mean now, it's beautiful."
What great fortune to have had this experience, to face rejection and a lukewarm reception for a bold vision, to have the opportunity to push on anyway and to see that the future I saw in my mind’s eye did in fact inspire the awe I knew it would. I’m lucky because now, decades later, I see a version of this story play out over and over and the pattern is easy to spot.
Here’s how it goes: a brilliant visionary just like you sees a bold new future full of awe and wonder and solved problems and longer lifespans and deeper human connection.
But the people on your team squint and tilt their heads as they try to wrap their minds around it.
The prospects you sell to tell you they can see how it helps them but they decide not to buy this quarter.
If your vision is larger than you can build yourself, then you are unlikely to have the luxury of rejecting the advice from colleagues and pressing on as I did in art class.
If your vision only succeeds if people decide to give you money in exchange for your vision, then you very likely want and need to know exactly what advice your customers have to help you sell more.
If you don’t have the luxury of being a high school art student, you have to figure out how to overcome the squints and unsolicited feedback if you want to make your vision real.
Which begs a question:
If you’re not exactly hearing “no that’s a terrible idea” and you’re also not exactly hearing “shut up and take my money,” you may wonder where in your org you need to make changes. Do you need marketing help? A better sales strategy? To build one or another missing features? What about someone in charge of “growth” ?
None of the above?
All of the above?
All of the above is the correct answer. That’s what 10 years helping teams onboard new users has taught me.
Onboarding was one of my first problem area specializations. I loved how every part of the business collapsed into this moment. Sales, customer success, market, product, even engineering - every department played a role in turning that new user or prospect into an actively engaged paying customer.
But after a while I started to see a pattern. The problems I was noticing and solving weren’t so much departmental problems as business problems owned by a particular department. The product’s positioning was off, but marketing was the only one acting on new positioning strategies while product continued to position around the same user group.
Sales targeted prospects who were different from the people product built for, which meant the ICP was different depending on which team you talked to. It followed that the messaging strategies I developed based on the voice of customer data I collected were highly tuned to one of those ICPs, one of those struggling moments, one of those positioning strategies - while another team worked off of an entirely different data set.
I started to believe that the onboarding growth problems many companies experienced and attempted to solve within a department were in fact the symptoms of innovation commercialization strategies a few layers above — and that those problems stretched across departments. Even if we humans usually sit in one department, the work we need to do to turn innovations into businesses stretches across departmental barriers.
Innovation Commercialization work (IC for short) is positioning. It’s pricing strategy. It’s Ideal Customer Profile Development.
And it happens on UX, product, engineering, financial models, enterprise sales, and marketing teams.
But to be really successful the strategy is not defined within a department but across.
One ICP for sales and another for marketing and a third for product turns us into walking-in-place Frankensteins.
One positioning model (or no positioning model at all) for sales and another for engineering means the wrong things get built and the wrong people get pitched.
The more I have worked across the org in product, UX, engineering, financial modeling, and enterprise sales, the more I have grown to believe that the real work of commercializing innovations is in how the work we do in each department collides.
I found my way to innovation commercialization work by realizing that most of the problems I was excited to solve in onboarding (positioning, revenue models, product strategy) were 1-2 strategic levels up from the work I was doing years ago (onboarding strategy, activation metric growth).
To get:
Paying customers
Happy users
You need:
Web copy
Marketing content
Sales collateral
Sales pitch design
New user onboarding experience
Amazing UX
Internal Communications Strategy
External Strategic Communications and Narrative Development
But if you want those building blocks in place, you need
Team Aligned
ICP Defined
Positioning Model
Messaging Strategy
User Research
Market Research
Buyer Research
Pricing Model
Clear Direction
That work is your innovation commercialization strategy.
And I want to help you with yours.