Mobile First. Cloud First. And now, Zoom First
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
As we work through the dog days of Shelter in Place, we have time to look ahead to coming back to work and to architecting what will become our new normal. I say architecting for a reason. Without conscious intervention, we humans tend to revert to prior state. It’s a comfort zone kind of thing. It is totally understandable. It is also a big mistake.
Major disruptions usher in new paradigms, in part to handle problems we never had before (e.g. an entire nation trying to work from home), in part because they break up the status quo such that inertial resistance to the new, the stuff that governs the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, is materially weakened. Ironically, that means coming back from a crisis is actually the best time to introduce wholesale changes. If you do not take advantage of this opportunity, if you simply restart the old engine, not only will you miss the window, you will marginalize your company’s future. The new paradigm will spread, faster than you expected, and by the time you realize you have to catch up, it likely will be too late.
Better to start now. Even though you don’t know what you are doing, at least not exactly. Inventing the new is liking cooking pancakes—the first batch are usually not the best ones. But there is no second batch until after you cook the first. So, fire up the griddle, and let’s get going.
It is not that long ago when the Apple iPhone came out and mobile became the new normal—very hard on us PC-centric types. And it is even more recent that AWS took computing by storm and cloud became the new normal—very hard on career IT professionals. Well, now it is Zoom’s turn.
Zoom is to video conferencing as Apple is to mobile phones as AWS is to cloud computing. In each case, there was some threshold of friction holding the new paradigm back, one that each of these companies managed to just obliterate. With phones, it was getting the apps from your carrier. With cloud, it was spinning up new devices or services. With video, it was spinning up a high bandwidth, low latency communication session on demand with no IT support of any kind. From Flintstones to Jetsons—one small leap for Zoom, one giant leap for mankind.
What Zoom has made clear to knowledge workers everywhere is that virtual meetings are far more productive than actual ones. Yes, we all are missing actual physical presence a ton. And yes, as soon as the barriers are removed, we are definitely going to want to reconnect. That’s because we are mammals. Social interaction is core to our being and central to our happiness. We want it and need it, and we should design it into our work lives for those very reasons. But in so doing, we need to acknowledge our new learning: it is not how we are most productive. And that’s what leads us to the new mantra.
Zoom first.
What does Zoom first look like? Who knows? Here’s what we have going for us though.
Facebook taught us how to make Mobile first, shifting the core of their advertising revenue from its original platform on PCs. Microsoft taught us how to make Cloud first, shifting the core of their back-office revenue from its original platform of on-premise software. Neither change was pretty. There is a whole lot of cheese to move. But both companies exemplify the rewards of getting those first pancakes going quickly. In Zone to Win terms, these were both driven out of the Transformation Zone by leaders who demanded everyone row in the new direction or get out of the boat.
Zoom first won’t be that draconian. It does not touch core revenue the way Mobile and Cloud did. It’s a Productivity Zone issue at heart. But it needs to move fast and brook no resistance, and that is not the Productivity Zone’s strong suit.
So, leaders take note. The back-to-work movement is about to get going. Digital transformation is the new watchword. Zoom is the killer app. If you want your company to catch this wave, step up now, and bring your teams with you.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube
CRO | Spire Integrated Systems | Experts in smart technology integration for luxury homes and commercial spaces.
4 年Great post, Geoffrey Moore! I remember our work at Cisco and our workgroup sessions about tornados within tornados in the collaboration and video market. The ubiquitous availability of "cost-effective" video was both aspirational and as terrifying as free dial tone. My, how this chasm has been crossed! Early adopters are reaping the benefits...laggards are struggling or learning quick!
Associate Director at Datacom | Human | Mentor | Technologist | Thinker | Disruptor | Evangelist | Challenger
4 年"What Zoom has made clear to knowledge workers everywhere is that virtual meetings are far more productive than actual ones." ... not sure this is always true ... there does seem to be a form of tax in these online meetings - not always. Example, the 5 min sync, has been replaced by the 30 min sync ... and we fill the 30 mins as that's how much time we've had to book. The adhoc sync is also a challenge, as I am never quite sure the individual is interrupt-able, although that has a positive for them. What are the other forms of tax? Nice thought piece, and it will be interesting to see how this forced social experiment pans out.
Director, Data Cloud Product Management @ Salesforce | Driving SQL Query Engine Innovation. Any posts are my personal views only.
4 年Spot on!! I've been in Enterprise Presales / Field Sales selling to Fortune 5000 for quite a while now and one thing I've noticed is that Field Sales Teams waste an obscene amount of money on Selling Expenses / T&E for onsite visits that are premature. Most of this time is spent on educating a customer on what we view a compelling event or need that they're not fully aware of. And other times its spent educating them on new, differentiating technology (IOT, AI, ML, Industry initiatives etc). After the 3rd of 4th costly flight/hotel/etc with many execs skipping or stepping out of meetings leaving us with non-decision makers, we finally get to a true starting point that truly necessitates the onsite visit. This has ALWAYS bugged me because I've been the victim of it so quite a few years ago, I stumbled on a company called Consensus (formerly known as DemoChimp). Their CEO is a serial entrepreneur and they provided a Sales Enablement framework for Sales Consultants/SalesEngrs to make their own "good enough" videos tailored to the customer in bite-sized chunks, complete with analytics of who's watched it, what segments they've watched and MOST IMPORTANTLY, what coworkers or executives they've forwarded it to. In my mind, this is the best indirect sales approach I could possibly imagine. If an exec has a chance to see a brief glance at your differentiation and are interested, both they and their peers will *actually* show up at the mtg and potentially bring more decision makers as well. I bring this up because I agree that seizing the day with the growing norm of ZOOM / camera-on webinars, Enterprise customers are becoming more acclimated to not expecting onsite visits for initial sales stage / early project discovery efforts. I'm afraid that if we don't take advantage of this, we'll slip back into this pre-Covid type costly, less efficient, and less effective sales habit of premature onsite visits. Todd Janzen and I have been working with Garin Hess as well as our Solutions Leadership teams to try and take advantage of this new Zoom/remote mtg norm. We see SOOO much potential for this but I'm unsure how our Sales/Distribution VPs and AcctExecs partners will react to this. After all "if you're not onsite, it doesn't count as a visit" has always seemed to be the norm for Field Sales. And unfortunately, you don't get a second chance to make a 1st impression from what I've seen. I know all our SE Mentors in the business like Peter Cohan Don Carmichael Julie Hansen and John Care are all about this remote sales enablement but I wanted to see if you've also seen Field Sales teams warm up to this type of stage2 or stage3 remote enablement strategy lately?
Executive Leadership / Domestic & International Growth Management / Sales Organization Development / Product Strategy- Go to Market Planning & Execution / Marketing Comms & Brand Strategy / Bus Dev / Investor Relations
4 年Zoom is to video conferencing as Kleenex is to tissue.
Director of Sales | HPC, AI, Storage, and Cloud solutions for Public Sector & Service Providers | Vision, Action, Results
4 年At first Zoom seemed ideal but I've had a few issues (others could not connect easily, a non-intuitive UI, etc.) that I've returned to Skype for personal use and Microsoft Teams (it's well integrated from phone to desktop) for business use.