Subject area:                      Competitive Strategy, Corporate Level Strategy, International Business Strategy

Region:                                   Boston, United States

Industry:                                CRM, Software, Marketing, Sales, and Service Activities.

Company:                              bpm’online

Decision Maker:                Katherine Kostereva, CEO of  bpm’online

Dilemma: In the Fall of 2017, bpm’online CEO Katherine Kostereva had the challenge of navigating her company through a field where large corporations with deep pockets were a mainstay. Two years ago, her company, a small player in the CRM market, moved its headquarters to Boston. Katherine soon realized the difficulty of determining how to penetrate the US market effectively.  Competing corporations included Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle, all of whom had significantly stronger resources to spend on marketing their products, and had the key intangible resource of being household brand names associated with quality products and services. bpm’online had to figure out how to increase their US market share, as they were only generating 5% of their overall revenue in the US CRM market. The firm saw a great opportunity in the US because 50% of the total CRM market was in the United States, however, competing with corporate giants was no easy feat. Kostereva decided to seek the insights and advice of a local university consulting team to determine how to proceed.