Business

EXPERIENCE

HBR.ORG

Case Study

Jill Avery is an assistant professor of marketing at the Simmons

School of Management. Thomas Steenburgh is an associate professor

of marketing at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

A software company debates its strategic focus.

by Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh

The Experts

Roger Martin, dean of the

University of Toronto’s Rotman

School of Management

ILLUSTRATION: BRETT AFFRUNTI

Mike Volpe, chief marketing

officer at HubSpot

HBR’s fictionalized case studies present

dilemmas faced by leaders in real

companies and offer solutions from experts. This

one is based on the HBS Case Study “HubSpot:

Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0” (case no.

509049), by Thomas Steenburgh, Jill Avery, and

Naseem Dahod. It is available at hbr.org.

Target the

Right Market

T

he knock on Jane Tamsen’s office

door startled her. Vikram, one of

Jane’s sales directors, poked his head

in. “You ready for us?” he asked.

Jane waved him in. Andrew, another of

her team members, followed. “Let’s hear

it,” Jane said.

“The data are showing what we’ve suspected all along,” Vikram started. “We’re

playing in two major markets. The first is

small businesses—they have owners who

run their own companies, fewer than 20

employees if that. The other is mediumsize businesses with 20 to about 100

employees; the purchaser at these places

is a senior manager, not the owner.”

“I think of them as ‘small Sams’ and

‘medium Marys,’” Andrew added.

“Creative,” Jane said.

Andrew had been one of her first hires

at SparkPlace, a two-year-old provider of

online-marketing software, and he’d continued to impress her. Founder and CEO

Dirk Middleton liked him, too, especially

after Andrew coined what would become

the company slogan: Marketing is broken.

Dirk, who had spent his career in sales,

started the business for that very reason.

He firmly believed that cold calling and

spamming were destroying marketing....