Many tech firms have a Field of Dreams approach – “build it and they will come” – only to learn the hard lesson when few fans take seats in the stands.
The lack of roar on game day is deafening.
Tech CEOs and founders often have fantastic technical skills across the entire stack and are justifiably proud of the excellence they’ve achieved through years of hard work. This mastery looks like a sharp blade honed to perfection.
The challenge is these skills don’t sell tickets or generate excitement to show up. So, the platform lives in stealth mode. Not because of the strategy, but because no one notices.
The key is to understand what matters most to the people you care about with your service or product. After the problem and the person (end user with the problem and the economic buyer) you want to be clear about which field has the greenest grass.
We Know Better Than You
A significant mistake is the presumption that potential customers should care. They should want visibility directed into a problem when other issues may be more pressing. Telling them, you should invest in our service because it’s amazing and it will solve a huge problem we’ve identified for you. Then they tell you, go fly a kite.
Apathy is one of the toughest competitors in existence and if you’re not solving a burning question defined by them, you’re just noise in their lives.
Selling Complexity with Complexity
We’re all familiar with tech pitches that delve deeply into the details, yet when pressed about who buying this fabulous new wonder the response is:
“Everyone needs this. They just don’t know it yet.”
Selling complexity wrapped within one’s ego is not a strategy. If your field of play is so complex that only your engineers understand it, you’re in trouble.
Don’t baffle your industry and prospects with BS.
The Perpetual Beginner’s Mind
In martial arts and Zen Buddhism there is the concept of Shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” It refers to remaining accepting to new ideas and possessing an attitude of openness. The paradox is that the more one knows about a subject, the more likely one will close off the mind to further learning. After digging deep, we make assumptions about what must be.
Embracing humility in expertise means always being a student and the most successful CEOs maintain curiosity and openness despite their achievements.
The insight in achieving breakthrough moments often comes from releasing attachment to current skill levels and the methodologies unpinning them.
Clarity and the Discipline of Choice
Beyond protecting the vision, every CEO needs to choose what the company is not doing. Sharing that the company isn’t for everyone and the team doesn’t serve all is part of the mission.
Be clear:
“We help [customer type] to [clear action] so they can [valuable outcome].”
This clarity – simple, specific, strategic – is the sharp edge that cuts through the ambiguity. By designing your activities specifically around a market you serve competitively, a field’s landscape gets transparent. The fog of chaos disappears and customers know why you exist and matter.
Design Your Go-to-Market Strategy Deliberately
The final dimension of your field of play is determining how you’ll reach customers. Even the perfect solution to an urgent problem will fail if your target users never discover it.
Answer the following before you write a single line of code:
- Through which specific channels can you most efficiently reach your target customers?
- What messaging will immediately resonate with their experienced pain?
- How will you overcome the inertia of existing solutions?
Countless tech companies have faltered because their GTM strategy consisted of little more than creating generic content and running ads. The successful ones map specific customer journeys and build acquisition channels that efficiently target their exact audience.
A great question to ask is:
“Have I as the CEO defined the field I want to dominate or am I just hoping the world will find me?”
The Path Forward
As a tech CEO, your primary responsibility isn’t the tech platform, it’s ensuring your remarkable technology solves the right problems for the right people and reaches them through the right channels.
By deliberately defining your field of play as putting your fans first, by placing them at the center of all you do, and by creating a playbook around the work you do best and saying NO to everything else – you and the team will build and sustain traction in a noisy marketplace.
When you understand the genius you bring to market, you can share your context and originality in a way that no one can replicate. That’s your ‘home’ field advantage.
If this perspective resonates with you, contact me on LinkedIn or at scott@purplefinchgroup.com
Contact me HERE if you’d like to learn more about one of my 4-hour consults for tech CEOs. Schedule a free 30-minute conversation.
Stay focused. Keep disrupting. Be well.
