Instead of proactively targeting unproven segments, use a 'Yellow' ICP category to test expansion. When prospects adjacent to your core ICP arrive as strong inbound leads, you can selectively engage. This allows the market to pull you into your next profitable segment, as exemplified by Snowflake's organic move into the enterprise.

Conventional wisdom suggests attacking an incumbent's weak points. Serval did the opposite with ServiceNow, targeting its core strength: configurability. By using AI to make customization drastically faster and easier, they offered a superior version of the feature that locks customers in, creating a compelling reason to switch.

Startups often fail to displace incumbents because they become successful 'point solutions' and get acquired. The harder path to a much larger outcome is to build the entire integrated stack from the start, but initially serve a simpler, down-market customer segment before moving up.

Snowflake's initial high-velocity sales model hit a wall with large enterprises. New CEO Frank Slootman mandated a change, forcing CRO Chris Degnan to "rip the bandaid off" and restructure the entire GTM organization in the middle of a fiscal year to create a dedicated enterprise sales motion.

To eliminate friction, Snowflake's marketing team, led by CMO Denise Pearson, abandoned MQLs. Instead, they focused solely on delivering qualified meetings for the sales team, treating sales as their primary customer whose success was paramount.

Snowflake invested seven months of its entire engineering team's effort to solve a specific clustering problem for one customer, Localytics. This seemingly costly detour created a core feature that became the key to winning major enterprise accounts like Nielsen, proving that bending for the right customer can redefine the product.

Instead of guessing your competitive advantage, ask potential customers which other solutions they've evaluated and why those products didn't work for them. They will explicitly tell you the market gaps and what you need to build to win.

Market leader Teradata dismissed the cloud and new competitors like Snowflake, believing their position was unassailable. This "arrogance," as described by Snowflake's CRO, created a massive blind spot, allowing Snowflake to capitalize on the cloud migration wave and ultimately crush the incumbent.

A "tollbooth" strategy finds a choke point of acute customer need. ClickUp built a tool to find 1-star reviews for competitors, then messaged those users immediately. This intercepted customers at the precise moment their existing option became unworkable, making ClickUp's alternative incredibly compelling and efficient for acquiring their first 100 customers.