Jeff Miller stands testimony to a rare brilliance in scaling a technology business. He is credited with successfully ‘crossing the chasm’ in the technology marketplace. With him at the helm of affairs, Documentum grew from a tiny start-up to be the definitive leader, successfully ensuring early adoption and mainstream acceptance.

He believed in the question – who is our target customer?

As CEO at Documentum, Miller attempted to clearly map the customer segments, and then sharply re-defined the target customer as executives in pharma companies involved in new drug proposals. This effectively brought down the addressable segment for Documentum to less than a thousand prospects. He offered a technology solution to automate and speed up enterprise documentation management and make submissions easy. This had immediate acceptance. After establishing their dominance in this niche, Documentum set out with a classic strategy to expand horizontally to adjacent target markets. Later the business itself transformed to offer enterprise content management and knowledge management solutions.

The growth was exponential from two million dollar revenues in 1993 to almost two hundred million in revenues by 2000. The strategy had paid off. Jeff Miller teaches us how to cross the chasm, to sharply define the target customer and aggressively go after the first 1000 customers. He believed in the question – who is our target customer?