Crossing the chasm is the single most important goal for a B2B application that seeks to disrupt the status quo. The playbook has held up for more than 30 years because it continues to just work. That said, it does not say anything about what to do if you’re stuck in the mud on the other side. So, let’s suppose your enterprise has successfully crossed the chasm, achieved tens of millions of dollars in ARR, but is no longer growing at a rate to keep pace with the Rule of 40 percent (the sum of your profit and your growth rate). Your investors are getting antsy. Now what?
First of all, know your place. You are still sub-scale for a customer CFO to consider you desirable as a go-to vendor. Same goes for a CIO who is trying to consolidate rather than expand the list of vendors they are working with. So, as with crossing the chasm, your only ally will be a process owner with a problem process that is not getting the IT support they need. This time, however, you are looking for an adjacent process owner, someone for whom your chasm-crossing sponsor would make a good reference. This lowers the bar for how problematic the use case may be because there is already some proof that the solution will work.
Note that we are still at the departmental level, still a point-product app, not a platform, not a suite. Those are all worthy ambitions for the future, but if you try to activate them now, the CFO and the CIO will get involved, and you will get bogged down in proof-of-concept exercises that will take forever to scale.
That said, it is not too early to recruit ecosystem partners to help secure your beachhead and expand your reach. The key here is to engage with companies that are big enough to help but small enough to give you their full attention—not Tier 1 systems integrators, more like outsourced service providers to small and medium businesses or specific departmental functions. You don’t need a lot of these, but the ones you do recruit have to lean in, so make sure that there is enough trapped value in the target use case to pay both you and them a premium for resolving it. To accelerate this effort, ask your professional services team to package up their hard-won knowledge and make it available to the partners who can expand your beachhead market. You want your team to be plowing in the adjacent field, not harvesting in the initial one.
On the go-to-market side, you still need to be disciplined in deploying most of your resources into the target market segment and not letting them get distracted by chasing one-off opportunities elsewhere. That said, you can relax a bit from the laser focus of chasm-crossing as long as, say, two-thirds of the marketing and sales resources are directly aligned with your current goal. Remember at this point that marketing is still a territory capture game, so you want to go after targets that are big enough to matter but small enough to lead, and as always, a good fit with your crown jewels.