Marketing Disruptive Technology

The terms “disruptive innovation” or “disruptive technology” have become staples in the vocabulary of venture capitalists, especially those focused on investing in technology enabled business models. An article by Andrew Rudin, CEO of Outside Technologies, a sales management consulting firm defines it as:
“An innovation [which] impacts the hegemony of the market-leading company, companies, or prevailing technologies for a specific market.” 
Sales and marketing professionals should always be thinking about this when planning an overall marketing strategy, or just next month’s campaign. Selling in an existing, crowded, or commoditized market with a perceived market leader is almost always easier than trying to create a new market from scratch.

In an existing market, most of the work has already been done for you. People already understand your product concept, they are somewhat familiar with the technology, and all you really need to prove to them is why you are better than the market leader, which in many cases is easy, because market leaders tend to be slow moving dinosaurs.
 Salesforce.com is great example of a company the executed brilliantly on marketing their disruptive technology and this strategy is one of the factors that contributed to their rapid growth over the last decade. They approached the CRM market, and brought it on-line. While there is a lot more to it than that, a disruptive strategy can be that simple.

Creating competitive advantage to position your company against the market leader is an important first step. Your competitive positioning should show the market or some subset of the market why you are different than the market leader. Combine this competitive messaging, with an outbound lead generation system and some out of the box marketing tactics and you have a recipe for a disruptive marketing strategy.