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Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 08/10/2015 03:16 PM
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....