Social Gastronomy

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If you define buyer market adoption as the intersection of your technology solutions adoption in the market with the buyer’s need to fix a painful problem, then your adoption rate for your technology solution is the conversion number in your available universe who actually recognize the pain to the number of buyers that you actually helped solve the underlying cause of that pain with your technology solution.

-Or-

Number of Buyers Solved Pain /Total Buyers in Pain = Adoption Rate as %

If that is the case, then your solution marketing is capped at a ceiling of 20% at best. Why?Because 80% of the conversations in the market are peer-to-peer without vendor participation. We have seen that consistently in the hundreds of markets that we have analyzed. We also confirm it with the hundreds of firms that we have spoken with in the Social Executive Council.

It makes sense, if you take the marketing conversion numbers of reach, awareness, and interest to unqualified leads; the numbers vary, but we haven’t seen many that are over 20% of available market converted. Then take the sales funnel conversion from mouth to  close and we find that 20% of the “no” decisions are lost to competitors; with 80% of the ”no” decisions or non-decisions are because they can’t get agreement to the problem, can’t see the connection to the solution, can’t feel comfortable with the risk/return on investment equation, or can’t get consensus as to course of action (which goes back to pain/problem).

So, let me recap:

• 80% of conversations in the market are happening without you at a peer level without your input as a vendor to influence their decision
• 80% of your available market is not responding to your direct marketing and jumping into the sales process
• 80% of your lead opportunities are cycling or lost due to problem clarity/agreement versus solution competition/price
• Your adoption marketshare of possible universe is <20%?

Could be a correlation. Food for thought?