In Blue Ocean Strategy, INSEAD business professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that the solution to business growth and success is to operate in an uncontested market. They use the metaphor of a blue ocean to represent an uncontested market, and they contrast it with a red ocean, a marketplace where fierce competition has stained the water with the blood of the combatants. According to Kim and Mauborgne, crowded markets and red ocean strategies tend to produce minimal profit margins, while blue ocean strategies lead to more profitable growth.
In this episode of ABM Done Right, Kristina Jaramillo is going to share how teams should be taking a W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s blue ocean approach when it comes to ABM.
During this podcast, Kristina shares how she’s been talking to the SVP of Sales and Marketing at a SaaS B2B startup that focuses on applying conversational AI to the supply chain industry to remove the gaps between planning and execution that leads to stock-outs, higher inventory costs, and reduced “on time-in full” service performance to customers. While the company has some competitors in the space, its main competitor is the “status quo” as 80% of business decisions are made without insights. The supply chain industry is used to dealing with distributed teams, disconnected systems, and manual reporting and the industry as a whole resists change even though supply chains around the world faced unprecedented disruption in the last year.
When you listen to the podcast, you’ll hear:
- How the SVP will need to accelerate growth after the company’s recent $4M funding round by strengthening the GTM strategy, improving the customer journey and implement new processes. His team will need to capture demand for their one-of-a-kind solution that received a patent last year. He’ll need to take a blue ocean strategy when executing ABM, where he creates uncontested market space vs. competing in existing market space. He’ll need to make the competition irrelevant by applying Challenger and teaching for differentiation vs. beating the competition. He’ll need to create and capture new demand vs. just exploiting existing demand that teams get from intent data platforms. He’ll need to align the whole system of his company’s sales and marketing programs, communications, interactions, and experiences in pursuit of differentiation.
- How too many organizations put ABM into buckets vs. using it to create, capture, and expand demand and revenue growth across the buyer’s journey and customer lifecycle? Teams should be using ABM to align with the 60% of the market that is stuck in the status quo. If you put together content, digital strategies, email outreach, and an account plan that aligns with the status quo’s strategic priorities and their unconsidered gaps that can impact their strategic vision, you can create the buying vision. And, when you create the buying vision vs. responding to intent data, you can drive larger, longer-term deals.
- Why it’s time that we focus on blue ocean approaches and apply them to ABM and how It will reduce sales and marketing operational costs, add more value to future and existing customers and drive larger deals.
