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How can you tell if your prospect is an Innovator, Early Adopter, Early or Late Majority, or Laggard? Amazingly, sometimes all you have to do is ask! Prospects will frequently self-identify as one category or another.
I was listening to a discovery call between a vendor and a prospect in pharmaceutical manufacturing and heard the prospect ask, “Where will our data sit with your solution: On your servers or ours?”
When informed that the offering was a cloud-based solution and that their data would be in the vendor’s cloud, the prospect objected, saying, “We can’t let our data out of our datacenter…”
This is a strong indication of a Late Majority trait: An unwillingness to pursue true SaaS offerings and a strong preference (still!) for on-prem software.
You can ask culture-based discovery questions to assess your prospect’s category similarly. What does your prospect’s current tech stack look like? What and when were their most recent purchases? What has been their purchase history? What constraints does their IT group impose on new offerings? (You can find more examples in the “Culture” section of Doing Discovery.)
Note that individuals may display category attributes that differ from their organization. Intriguingly, many conservative (Majority) companies have technology scouting or assessment teams. These groups are tasked to explore and examine new technologies and disruptive products in a “safe” environment. Their findings then may (or may not) be pursued by the overall organization, but cautiously in any case! Accordingly, you could feel as though you are making excellent progress in establishing a toehold in a large organization, only to find that the footprint takes years to expand.
Resources:
Doing Discovery:
https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5: