Problem Definition
As HubSpot approached its 1,000th customer, co-founders Brian Halligan and
Dharmesh Shah wanted to accelerate their company’s growth and increase profitability.
They wanted HubSpot to be to marketing what Salesforce.com is to sales. HubSpot must
develop market segmentation and targeting strategies in order to analyze which customer
type to serve as prospects come in through the funnel and which to turn away. Their
problems included choosing how to move forward with their inbound marketing and
whom they should focus on as clients.
Whether they chose B2B or B2C markets, or Owner Ollies or Marketer Marys
would affect their software update decisions moving forward. They also wanted to
reassess their current pricing strategy and modify it so they would receive a larger ROI
upfront and be able to lock customers into a longer subscription since many Owner Ollies
and some Marketer Marys would buy a subscription to their product and then cancel after
just a few months once they saw that their business initially improved. Lastly, even
though HubSpot preached, and was built on, inbound marketing, the founders wondered
if they might have to eventually adapt outbound marketing strategies as well in order to
use their sales team more effectively.
Alternatives
1. Focus on B2B customers – The acquisition rate of B2B customers is higher than
the B2C customer. Inbound marketing and lead-qualification analysis is much
