Claim
At HubSpot Labs, running growth experiments to find new opportunities, Sam reframed the question every CMO asks. The threat isn't a competitor with more features or a lower price. The threat is that most companies still do marketing and sales the same way they did ten years ago, which means a product like HubSpot's is incompatible with their operating practice. The growth ceiling isn't market share; it's market readiness.
"The biggest impediment to growth that we have is not someone selling a cheaper software or a software with more features. The biggest impediment to growth is that the majority of companies are still pretty bad at sales and marketing."
· Sam Mallikarjunan, BuySellAds Re:Growth interview
Mechanism
If your category's growth is gated by buyer sophistication rather than feature parity, the highest-ROI marketing investment is advancing the thinking in the market, even if individual pieces don't drive immediate revenue. HubSpot Labs launched ThinkGrowth.org (a Medium publication for executives) as an explicit market-development play, not a lead-gen channel. The bet: if more companies become competent at modern marketing, the entire TAM grows, and you'll capture your share of that larger base.
Conditions
Holds when: you're a category leader (or contender) in a category where buyer practice lags the product. Fails when: you're early-stage in a saturated category where standard practice is already set, the lift goes to the share-stealer, not the market-developer.
Why it matters for PMM
Most PMM strategy focuses on competitive differentiation against named alternatives. Sam's frame is the third axis: differentiate against no-decision and bad-practice. The deck slides "vs. Competitor X" matter; the deck slide "this is what good looks like" often matters more.