One of the primary marketing challenges any enterprise software leadership team faces is figuring out what market segment they want to play in.
The more innovative and disruptive an early-stage vendor is, however, the more difficult this challenge becomes.
If you lump themselves in with other vendors in a particular market segment, you they are but a small fish in a large pond.
Perhaps it makes more sense to head out on your own, defining a new market segment that you become the leader in by default.
Unfortunately, a single vendor is never a market segment. To define a market segment, you must have both competitors and customers within that segment.
Leadership teams must resolve this paradox.
All vendors – especially startups – are looking to offer some unique differentiation. But if your differentiation is truly unique, then you don’t have competitors – and thus no market segment to participate in.
The big analyst firms are absolutely no help. If you speak to one of their analysts, you’ll get a mix of confusion and ignorance.
After all, big analyst firms divide the market into buckets so they can assign analysts, write reports, and define quadrants or waves or whatever.
They won’t do those things until a segment has a critical mass of participants – at least half a dozen, maybe more.
When a segment gets too crowded, they’ll split it into two. When it shrinks too much, they’ll retire it, rolling remaining vendors into some other bucket.
This approach makes sense for the analyst firms, but it doesn’t reflect customer buying behavior – and thus, doesn’t represent markets as they truly are.
For these reasons, innovative and disruptive vendors who don’t fall into the analyst buckets can’t depend on the big analyst firms to understand them or provide useful information to customers about them.
That lack of understanding, however, doesn’t reflect the true growth of market segments, which depends more upon customer demand rather than market categorization.
As a boutique analyst firm, Intellyx takes a different approach from the big guys.
We’re a ‘no bucket zone’ here at Intellyx. We focus on helping vendors who don’t fall neatly into the analyst buckets communicate their differentiated value proposition to their customers.
We don’t assign market segments to vendors. Instead, we start with the business problem that they are best positioned to solve and then help them tell the right story to the people who have that problem.
The more disruptive and innovative you are, the more that Intellyx’s approach makes sense. Don’t expect the big analyst firms to have your best interests at heart. Instead, drop us a line.
Copyright © Intellyx BV. No AI was used to write this article.
