PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE REPORT
Master of Science in International Business
15/09/2018
JABMO (Previously named Azalead)

Silly PATNAIK
Marketing analyst
Email: [email protected]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TOC o “1-3” h z u EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PAGEREF _Toc524814743 h 4INTRODUCTION PAGEREF _Toc524814744 h 5Company history and context PAGEREF _Toc524814745 h 6Mission statement PAGEREF _Toc524814746 h 9Vision statement PAGEREF _Toc524814747 h 9Company objectives PAGEREF _Toc524814748 h 9Products and/or services PAGEREF _Toc524814749 h 10INTERNSHIP POSITION OR WORK EXPERIENCE DESCRIPTION PAGEREF _Toc524814750 h 14Description of the position held and related objectives PAGEREF _Toc524814751 h 14Description of the expected outputs PAGEREF _Toc524814752 h 14INTERCULTURAL ANALYSIS PAGEREF _Toc524814753 h 15Analysis of the company’s cultural background PAGEREF _Toc524814754 h 15Analysis of company cultural diversity management PAGEREF _Toc524814755 h 19Possible suggestions for future improvement PAGEREF _Toc524814756 h 20TRIPOD ANALYSIS PAGEREF _Toc524814757 h 21External analysis – Porter’s 5-forces framework PAGEREF _Toc524814758 h 21Introduction PAGEREF _Toc524814759 h 21Threat of new entrants PAGEREF _Toc524814760 h 21Threat of substitutes PAGEREF _Toc524814761 h 22Bargaining power of buyers PAGEREF _Toc524814762 h 24Bargaining power of suppliers PAGEREF _Toc524814763 h 25Rivalry of established competitors PAGEREF _Toc524814764 h 26Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc524814765 h 27Internal analysis – Barney’s VRIO framework PAGEREF _Toc524814766 h 28Introduction PAGEREF _Toc524814767 h 28VRIO resources and competences PAGEREF _Toc524814768 h 29Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc524814769 h 32Institutional analysis PAGEREF _Toc524814770 h 32Introduction PAGEREF _Toc524814771 h 32Regulatory pillar PAGEREF _Toc524814772 h 33Normative pillar PAGEREF _Toc524814773 h 33Cognitive pillar PAGEREF _Toc524814774 h 33Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc524814775 h 33Tripod analysis conclusions PAGEREF _Toc524814776 h 34CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY PAGEREF _Toc524814777 h 35Stakeholder analysis of the company PAGEREF _Toc524814778 h 35Description of the adopted CSR-response PAGEREF _Toc524814779 h 38Possible suggestions for future improvement PAGEREF _Toc524814780 h 39PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SELF-ASSESSMENT PAGEREF _Toc524814781 h 40Technical competences acquired PAGEREF _Toc524814782 h 40Managerial competences acquired PAGEREF _Toc524814783 h 41Relational and intercultural competences acquired PAGEREF _Toc524814784 h 42Contribution given to the organization PAGEREF _Toc524814785 h 43FINAL CONSIDERATIONS PAGEREF _Toc524814786 h 43REFERENCES PAGEREF _Toc524814787 h 45Appendix A PAGEREF _Toc524814788 h 46 PAGEREF _Toc524814789 h 46
EXECUTIVE SUMMARYI worked as a Marketing analyst intern at Jabmo (previously named Azalead), a leading supplier of ABM (account-based marketing) solutions.
The company uses its hyper-aware platform to capture anonymous buyer activity from target accounts and provide personalized account-based advertising solutions to its business-to-business(B2B) Manufacturers. Headquartered in Paris, Jabmo is in 4 locations- US, Mauritius, Sweden and Paris. However, the report focuses on the analysis of its presence at Paris as I was part of the Marketing team at Paris office.

Account based execution software industry is one of the fastest growing industries. Jabmo is a startup that provides market software specialized in account-based marketing. However, it has been recently recognized as a Leader in Account based marketing solutions by Forrester.

The objective of this internship (required as part of the curriculum of master’s in international business program at IESEG School of Management) is to be able to leverage my academic skills in real time situations at workplace and earn professional experience.

This report primarily focuses on providing a comprehensive analysis of the company in terms of its strategic choice of corporations, CSR initiative undertakings and intercultural diversity management.
It also includes the professional competencies I gained during the internship and my contributions towards the tasks I was involved in.

INTRODUCTIONWith the help of my previous experience in BI reporting and the academic skills gained during the MIB program, I was offered an internship at Jabmo, a SaaS provider for Account based marketing solutions and have an opportunity to be a part of the marketing team
The main reason for choosing this internship was my interest towards learning the current trends and technologies being used in Marketing and being able to provide better analytics using these tools.

My missions during this internship included:
Analyze quantitative/qualitative data to discover manufacturing companies and customer trends
Provide reports and dashboards using data mining and statistical methods to the leadership team to drive customer utilization of the hyper aware platform developed by Jabmo
Assist with Salesforce database entering and updating accounts and generating reports
During my internship, I had the opportunity to closely work with the Chief marketing manager and Marketing analyst and understand the business-to-business(B2B) marketing strategies used to drive the business at Jabmo. The Marketing team was solely involved in building campaigns, writing webinars, email and social marketing, and reporting the overall performance on a weekly and monthly basis. My daily schedule involved getting acquainted with the business terminologies, updating accounts in Salesforce, and execute ad hoc tasks given by the Marketing team. I was also involved in running weekly/monthly reports to derive the overall account engagement data and assist the Marketing analyst to present the same to the leadership team.

Throughout the internship, I had the opportunity to attend many workshops and trainings conducted by the company. This helped me to understand the business to business(B2B) buying cycle better and leverage this knowledge in my day to day operations.

COMPANY DESCRIPTION
Company history and contextJabmo was founded in 2013 by Nick Heys and Herve Paolini. The company had been operating under the name Azalead for several years since its launch. In May 2018, they rebranded themselves as Jabmo. This rebranding was done to make it clearer to the customers that the focus is not about generating leads but to identify and capture anonymous buyer’s activity and help our business-to-business(B2B) customers tailor and have personalized messages for these buyers.
Account based marketing has been a new concept for many people. Earlier, most of the companies had huge challenges in generating more revenue from existing customers. There was an inherent disconnection between their sales and marketing teams which impacted their business too. Sales team were frustrated as they used the spray and prey marketing approach to identify their customers. Buyers were annoyed because their potential suppliers won’t support them as per their preference.

Account based Marketing focuses on bridging this gap by helping companies have shorter sales cycle, see less marketing wastage and have higher win rates. Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of companies that are investing in account-based marketing program. This helps business-to-business(B2B) companies not only to align their marketing and sales better, but identify, attract, engage, and convert their target accounts into potential prospects. Many account-based marketing programs derail themselves by confusing account intelligence with a persona. A persona is useful, but it is based on an individual and not a company—this is the way some B2B marketers think. Flip it. B2B marketers need to think like direct field sales reps and focus on the account first and the Account Based Marketing Template is a great framework to put, and keep, sales and marketing on the same page.

If a business to business marketing organization is finding it hard to correlate its impact on revenue, then account-based marketing can be a very good option. ABM is focused only on the strategic accounts, which the sales reps are focused on too. This concept makes it easier to track the accounts in the sales funnel. And, if the marketing team gets a chance to align with the sales team to build and execute the acquisition and retention of customers, the company can earn more profitability.

Apart from this, account-based marketing is focused on personalized marketing that basically started from account-based selling. During its initial phase, account-based marketing was executed only by the large organizations that had enough resources and could engage staffs to coordinate marketing and sales efforts to their potential and engaged accounts. However due to technology advancement and development of tools that can perform market research and track customers easily, more businesses have now access to the vast information which is very necessary to perform account-based marketing effectively. This is of great advantage if your business-to-business enterprise doesn’t have enough resources in marketing and sales development to engage in each account. Companies that invest in account-based marketing rely on highly researched information. An account-based strategy relies on limited yet qualified leads instead of using a wide marketing funnel with many customers.

B2B marketers target companies by pulling and using data about the company from different sources and providers like Orbis to increase engagement. They try to reach out these audiences in various ways. Some of the companies reach their audiences through their marketing campaigns and if these audiences engage, the marketing team gets information of these audiences and tries to convert them as accounts by nurturing them from the top of the funnel. It does not stop there. They also try to nurture this list as it goes down the funnel and progresses through the journey of the customer. This predictive model of account-based marketing focuses on building relationships with targeted audiences at accounts over lead generation. Hence, it has proven to be more effective as some companies perform well with lead generation, while many find it hard to handle their lead management process. In this current market scenario, ABM approach often demands a potential account to say they’re interested in a specific brand. This can only help them to be on top of the funnel.

Besides this, they must have some education to become a lead that is ready for sales while this nurturing process is ongoing. In addition, there are many influencers that affect the purchase decision and increasing lead volume. With regards to the funnel dynamics, more than three quarters of the journey of a buyer is already finished before the buyer even reaches sales. The B2B enterprise might need to specialize to stay ahead in their business as the account-based marketing industry is growing and getting more competitive. With Account based marketing model, the process of targeting narrows down to very small and niche customer groups or become individual customer accounts.
However, there are many risk factors involved in account-based marketing. The problem with account-based marketing is that it focuses on small units and tries to invest major time and resources in it. For example, if a company operates on a traditional business model with 1,000 different customers in a specified month or year, marketing their product to each of them individually would be quite tough or even impossible. However, on the other hand, Business-to-business enterprises tend to have few yet larger customer accounts. Marketing to each of these unique clients is much easier and manageable. Sometimes customers or clients also tend to have very specific needs and give more actionable data which get challenging if we must develop a marketing strategy for them.
If we must look at the benefits of implementing ABM into the strategy of a business to business enterprise,
More than 80% of the companies have seen an increase in target account engagement
Over 70% said that they find a better alignment between sales and marketing after investing in ABM
Over 65% state that more qualified prospects are generated after implementing ABM in their strategy
Around 60% said they benefit by having a better understanding of program performance
Lastly,55% of the companies experience more sales pipeline opportunities than before
However, Account-Based Marketing strategy might fail due to many reasons. The enterprise has a database of companies that is not researched properly and thoroughly. There is no understanding between Sales and marketing team and they do not agree on the accounts. The criteria and strategy used to select these accounts does not align well with the value proposition, content and programs. The company does not follow a proper documentation process and the decision-making steps are not documented. The company does not agree on specific business functions involved and the designation of individuals who work in the purchase process and these are not being documented. There is no manual created for each targeted account to draw a conclusion of who should be considered as a potential head to reach out for each of the the accounts and how to reach out to them.

Now, if we take Jabmo into consideration, it has developed a hyper aware Account based marketing platform along with many integrated applications attracts the manufacturers globally to help them drive business by serving relevant and personalized contents to their target accounts. Last year, it purchased Freya News of Sweden which specializes in Account based marketing solutions. Jabmo was also named a Leader by Forrester in the Account based marketing New Wave Report this year.

Mission statementA mission statement describes the objective of a company and its approach to meet the objective.
The purpose of Jabmo is to enhance its account-based management (ABM) Platform so that the customers see minimal marketing wastage, bigger deals, shorter sales cycles and higher win rates.
“We like to teach & challenge our customers.”-Jabmo
As Jabmo is on the path to make its presence in the market and build a strong relationship with its customers, it is also committed to teach the customers and give them the opportunity to challenge the company to enhance its product and make it more effective.

Vision statementA vision statement is a description of where the company would want to be in future. It is a declaration of a company’s goals and intention. Jabmo aims to change the world of Business-to-business (B2B) marketing and transform the way business to business(B2B) companies market operates and make it better. Being a niche solution, Jabmo does not currently have the marketing presence of the leaders. The vision of the company is to achieve that.

“With a vision to change the world of B2B marketing” -Jabmo
Company objectivesThe objective of a company is any goal or outcome an organization would want to achieve. It can be achieving sales success, customer service goals or financial goals. The main objective of the company has always been to provide a seamless customer experience across all touch points. To achieve this, the customer success team has been pivotal in provide quality customer service and improve response time of client enquiries.
In terms of financial objectives, currently the company is focusing on increasing capital and investments to make the product more efficient and scalable.
Being one of the budding start-ups, Jabmo aims at implementing new technologies and features to its product/services. To maintain that, the company constantly encourages employees to enroll in the company wide workshops and training programs to improve their productivity.

Products and/or servicesJabmo offers a fully integrated Account based marketing Platform to its customers that provides entire solution for Account based marketing. Its patent pending technology is integrated with multiple technologies like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and Pardot. It senses company website visitors and engages target accounts through Account-Based IP Advertising and Retargeting, Website Personalization, sales enablement signals, and provides a real time Account based marketing dashboard.

Applications included in the platform are as below:
Identify anonymous buyer activity
The patent pending technology of the company tracks buying signals from the target accounts and makes use of Artificial intelligence to get target account activity even when they visit from any unregistered IP address.

Reach Entire buying cycle committee
The Account based IP advertising application uses the company’s database to send personalized advertisements to the target accounts of its customers
Build a memorable buying experience
Companies that use Jabmo website personalization generate double engagement rate with target accounts with the help of the Account based Web personalization application that, sends pre-filled webforms, personalized welcome messages and industry specific marketing assets for anonymous visitors.

Engage early in the buying cycle
The Ad retargeting application identifies target account visitors when they come to the customer’s website and follows up with a series of personalized and relevant advertisements throughout the buying cycle
Monitor Account based marketing Performance
The account-based analytics application helps the clients to see how marketing is impacting their sales pipeline and revenue
Optimize sales timing
With the help of the Sales enablement tool, the sales representatives of Jabmo’s clients can see when their target accounts engage with their content
Get a 360-degree view of Account activity
The clients can benefit from managed services and packages integrated within the platform. Some of them include Marketing Kick-Off Meetings, Sandbox Installation & Validation, Production Installation, Marketing & Sales Training and Ongoing Matching QA.

Apart from this, there are several managed services that the company provides with the product as a package.

Strategy: The company helps its clients in defining the business goals for target account management. This is done by ensuring that it complements well with the current go-to-market strategy. Other services include auditing the existing processes of the clients, their technology platforms, and integrations and determine the metrics and frequency of reporting. Jabmo also provides advices on the organizational changes, including skills development and sourcing as part of the service package.

Program design: The company supports its clients in developing segmentation strategies, analyze and develop tiers for their target audiences. It also helps them in analyzing and auditing their contents and defining the buyer journeys.

Implementation: When a customer partners with Jabmo to use its products, the company supports the setup and configuration of the ABM Platform. It makes sure that the product is integrated well with their website, CRM, marketing automation and other tools as required. This is done through APIs and Packages developed by the Research and development team.

Integration: The company also looks after the integration of the Jabmo platform with the marketing automation, Sales, CRM, Website systems and emails.

Program development: As part of the services included, the company designs an omni channel account-based marketing program for specific business goals to make the product user friendly and maintainable to use
Contents and creatives design: The company also builds campaigns and develops marketing content like emails and advertisements for retargeting, templates and white papers, graphics and icons, animations and videos.

Program execution: Jabmo runs individual campaigns by building segments, creating and sending advertisements. It also helps customers by generating performance reports to monitor their account coverage and advertisement deliveries
Other services provided by Jabmo in this product package are as below:
Audience builder: The company pulls all the data from the customer contact points to build marketing audiences for their ABM programs and ad campaigns. If the volume of client’s data grows, the company creates new segments and make them more personalization and relevant.

Content repurpose: The company repurpose the marketing assets of its clients to generate more advertisements and contents with better insights
A/B Testing: This service involves turning ideas into powerful tests. The consultants within the company use A/B marketing services to help the clients drive more account engagement without spending more on advertisements.
CRM Integration: The technical team leverages the CRM integration package to build data flows between Jabmo and the CRM of its clients. Some of the integration services include product installation, testing, training, support etc.

Website personalization: The company works with the marketing and sales team of the clients to prepare documents for their website personalization strategy. The technical support team of Jabmo works with the development team of the customers to leverage the API developed in house and documentation to run their personalization campaigns.
Personalized banner advertisement: Jabmo’s creative team offers consulting and creation of a creative in-house from the initial phase of a creative and provides everything that is required to create a creative like images, logos etc. The services that the company provides also includes the implementation of an external tracker and third-party tag.

INTERNSHIP POSITION OR WORK EXPERIENCE DESCRIPTIONDescription of the position held and related objectivesI was hired by Jabmo to be a part of the marketing team for the role of Marketing analyst. As part of my roles and responsibilities, I was required to work closely with the Chief marketing officer, assist her in generating the weekly and monthly reports/dashboards on the overall customer engagement. My position also required me to conduct market research to discover manufacturing companies and collect their data, update entries in Salesforce, analyze related data from different sources to collate the weekly engagement and report it to the leadership team.

I also got an opportunity to assist the other team members in their tasks such as automate their tasks, prepare dashboards in Salesforce for the sales representative across organization and schedule them to be delivered on a timely basis.

At Jabmo, all teams work closely with each other and help each other whenever required. So, I took the opportunity to learn a lot about the product assisting the product manager in collecting information from the customer success team on how the new product features help the customers and streamlining the internal processes.

Description of the expected outputsThe overall experience from this internship helped me learn a lot about the concept of account-based marketing and the product of company. This helped me to provide better insights in the reports and dashboards I delivered. Working with other members in the team helped me to understand how email or social media marketing is done and this reflected on the analysis I reported to the team. I was soon able to predict the issues and provide scope of improvements in the current processes.

Working with other teams like product gave me a chance to automate some of the processes which added value to the product quality.

Overall, I was able to utilize the tenure in learning several technologies like Salesforce, Pardot, Snowflake and leverage them in providing better visualization to the presentations I had to deliver.

INTERCULTURAL ANALYSISAnalysis of the company’s cultural backgroundJabmo strives at diversifying its workforce by hiring employees of different cultural backgrounds and nationalities. In addition, it has spread its offices across different locations like Mauritius, US, Sweden and France. A multicultural workforce like this can be of many advantages like more productivity, broad perspectives and ability to compete in today’s global market.

Jabmo has always encouraged to learn local languages and cultures although the official language is English at the work environment
However, having an intercultural environment at workplace can also create barriers and that they could impact an employee’s ability to build connections and stay motivated. As Jabmo is a French start up, to understand these differences, it is crucial to understand the French work culture and how it integrates within the organization culture. I use the Hofstede’s Six Dimensions of Culture to do an in-depth analysis of the same.

If we consider the Hofstede dimension of cultural analysis, the cultural values of Jabmo aligns with most of the French organizations. Below is an analysis of the same:
Power Distance index
This refers to the degree of inequality among people with and without power.

In France the score is high relatively. Hence, hierarchies are quite common in organizations. Although, the organizational structure is complex in bigger organizations, the startup culture is a bit simpler. In a startup, the divisions and sub divisions are less, and atmosphere is quite friendlier. Therefore, employees do not feel the distance among tier superiors and don’t hesitate to reach out to their leads for any concerns. From my experience, in terms of the power distance with the immediate boss, the relationship was quite friendly, and I was able to reach out to him if I had any concerns or new ideas to improve the processes. Even the leads of some departments were helpful whenever I reached out for help. However, there were few instances wherein I could not reach out to the head of some departments directly and had to wait for getting any inputs from the team members of those departments.

Individualism
France scores high in terms of individualism. People put themselves as a priority in such kind of society. In Jabmo, from my personal experience, I believe that individual achievements are very important. Usually startups expect their employees to act an owner of their task and recognize their achievements accordingly. Even at Jabmo, although teams help each other to achieve the goals and objectives, but employees are expected to take ownership of tasks and work independently to accomplish them. There are few teams who work individually as a department and often hesitate to help other teams. This was quite challenging for me when I had to collaborate with them to get my task done.

However, managers often appreciate their team members for their hard work. There has also been a monthly reward program I office to appreciate employees showing entrepreneurship skills to motivate them. From my experience within my team, my supervisor always encouraged me to think out of the box and take ownership of my work. At the same time, he always acknowledged my hard work and appreciated when it was required. This kept me highly motivated throughout my internship.

Masculinity
According to Hofstede, Masculinity focuses on having a society that stresses on achievement or nurture. While high masculinity is seen to be a trait that is ego or money oriented, Low masculinity is about building relationships and caring for each other or where quality of life is important. France scores quite low in terms of masculinity.

Most of the startups focus on being ambitious and often face ego clashes between employees. Many quite due to these reasons, either not being able to cope up with the competition or stressed due to ego conflicts. However, Jabmo, being a French company, aims at providing a good environment for its staffs like offering the opportunity to work from home, and encouraging staffs to participate in various extra-curricular activities. Although employees are driven by achievement and success with regards to their projects, most of them also follow the usual working hours and don’t prefer staying late at office .In addition , the company also provides extra remuneration and benefits like free breakfast for its staffs, yearly kick off meetings wherein staffs from other locations visit the headquarters and engage in annual events as part of the team building exercises. Having said that, I have also experienced few situations in my team wherein the team was involved in conflicts and it was usually solved by force rather making negotiations. I presume this might have to do with the current organizational structure change where some of the employees hesitate change.

Uncertainty Avoidance
As per Hofstede’s theory, the dimension – Uncertainty Avoidance refers to how a society deals with unknown situations and creates ways to avoid them. With ambiguity comes anxiety and not every culture adapts to uncertain situations or knows how to handle them.

The French culture scores high in this dimension. The French people usually do not believe in taking risks. They do not like surprises and believe in being well structured and prepared. France aims at having stronger laws, rule and regulations and expects its citizens to abide by them. Jabmo has its defined rules and regulations in place too, which needs to be abided by. For instance, it is among the few Account based marketing companies that is GDPR compliant (as per European law). The company has recruited some staffs that are solely involved in internal auditing and ensuring that the client’s data is being protected and their privacy is respected. The Customer success team also ensures that the client profile is assessed properly for any risks involved before onboarding them. Talking about the internal work culture I do believe some of the French employees are not quite good at handling surprises. They didn’t take so well when the organization structural change happened and resisted to most of the changes made within the leadership team.
Long Term Orientation
As per Hofstede, this dimension talks about how a society deal with their present and future while considering their past. In this, he mentions about two kinds of societies- Normative who follow time honored norms and usually find it difficult to adapt to the societal change, and Pragmatic society which motivates people to make efforts and thrive through modern education and prepare themselves for the future.

France scores high on the long-term orientation, thus categorizing itself as a pragmatic society. Typically, in a French society, people have always thrived to develop and adapt to the modern era even though they are proud of their ancient culture and have tried to preserve that. In my experience while doing my internship, I felt Jabmo focuses a lot in adapting to new trends and technologies. It has invested in embedding Artificial intelligence into its product. The company is also keen at encouraging its employees in attending webinars related to new technologies. The platform called “Everyone Social” that Jabmo uses to enhance the social media marketing is one good example to cite as it is quite new in marketplace. Jabmo has always encourages its staffs to focus on innovation and how they can add value to the product. However, the company also believes in fairness and taking responsibility of one’s own actions. This shows that Jabmo does have a long-term vision for its success imbibing the necessary values and still looking forward in adapting to the future.
Indulgence
According to the Hofstede’s theory, this dimension has been defined as a degree to this people try to control their desires based on their upbringing. While Indulgence can mean having weak control on their urges, Restraint on the other hand describes a stronger desire of emotions and desires.

In terms of Indulgence, France scores somewhere in the middle. This could mean that the society handles their desires and urges moderately. In terms of the working culture at Jabmo, it is expected from employees to control their desires and impulses with regards to the day to day operations. People who work in Sales team, especially are expected to deal with clients on an appropriate level and not provide wrong information to buy them into getting the deal signed to reach their target. The employees are also supposed to be careful while sharing the third-party information with the clients without the permission from the leadership team. Therefore, I believe there is a modern sign of indulgence prevailing at Jabmo.
Drawing a conclusion from the analysis of the cultural background of Jabmo using Hofstede’s model, it is quite clear that the company has its rules and standard practices that guide the culture within the organization. Even if there are situations which make some employees to behave in a certain way, it might not necessary mean that there is some issue within the organization culture.
To get a better understanding, another way to analyze the work culture of Jabmo would be to use the framework of Hall’s cultural model.

The communication at Jabmo, in my opinion is quite high context. Although, the managers insist on having written communication channels for all the tasks and having detailed descriptions of the same, most of the times the message is not clear, and employees tend to brainstorm and have verbal communications to understand better. Some people tend to communicate with their facial expression too. As the company is international and has employees from all over the world, it gets more challenging to understand what people feel when they use their facial expressions to express how they feel. Besides the French employees usually share a strong bond of relationship with their company. Even at Jabmo, I find many of the employees especially French have a strong faith on the company’s vision and have been associated with the company for quite a long time. Although this is not true for most of the international employees, and the fact that French do not prefer to change jobs frequently, it is quite interesting to see how they thrive within the organization for a long time.

Time management is another aspect to be considered while understanding the organizational culture. The office hours usually begin at 9 am, however the employees at Jabmo have the flexibility to start at around 9.30 am. The company does not enforce any strict timing for its staffs. The French like few other cultures have the tendency to show up late for meetings and this is considered normal. However, having an international office wherein, you have staffs from other locations, this gets challenging to handle. Sometimes even the French employees find it difficult to deal with the time while working with colleagues from countries or having meetings or workshops. However, they do try to understand this might not be acceptable in other countries. Apart from this, the French people value the importance of having healthy conversations and building relationships. It is quite common to see in France that the people take many tea/coffee breaks during the working hours with their colleagues. Irrespective of that, they still manage to finish their tasks on time and are very productive. The atmosphere at Jabmo is quite the same. I find this useful as it refreshes your mind and helps you in building relationships with other teams.
Hence, analyzing the organizational culture through both the models, I understand how the French culture is being perceived through these dimensions and how it impacts at an organizational level. In terms of my personal experience within Jabmo, it has been quite like most of the French companies. Although some of the dimensions were not the same, I believe the reason for that would be the start up culture prevailing within the organization. In the end, it was quite interesting to see how international companies deal with different cultures and try to bridge the cultural gap. This is quite important for the company to keep the staffs happy and increase productivity.

Analysis of company cultural diversity management
Jabmo aims at brining in the best minds from different cultural backgrounds. This is very important for the company to bring in new perspective at work and help its employee to train how to deal with customers coming from different parts of the world.
Globalization is very essential to compete in today’s market. To achieve that, Jabmo has established itself in four locations across the globe and hired contractors from countries like Ukraine and Mauritius. It has managed to make its presence in the Account based marketing sector in a very short span of time. The human resources also conduct Share and Learn programs wherein employees from other locations talk about their culture and their work atmosphere. This not only gives an idea of other cultures but also motivates many people to move other locations where their project demands and easily adapt to that culture. In addition, it helps many staff when they are required to travel other locations for official visits.
Although most staffs are in France, the company is continuously hiring people from different nationalities within its headquarters. Although the company follows the geocentric approach, the ethnocentric approach still exists. Jabmo often sends its French managers to run the business operations in foreign branches.
Jabmo being an international company often requires teams to communicate with fellow members from other branches. There are times when meetings and trainings are being organized for an entire team having members from different locations. This results in bring new perspectives and adds value to the content discussed. The leadership teams also aim at conducting many team building activities for their team members. For instance, when I joined as intern, the company organized an escape game for all the staffs which gave me an opportunity to introduce myself to many colleagues and interact with them. This creates a good working environment for the employees as the employees get a chance to know each other better and help when required for any tasks.
Coffees breaks are other good reasons to learn about how other employees work and understand their role and work better. This works especially for colleagues with whom you do not work directly.

In my overall experience, I understand Jabmo is keen at expanding its diversity at work place and this could be a great strategy for the company’s success in the long run.
Possible suggestions for future improvementFrom my personal experience at Jabmo, it is a great start up to work with. Jabmo follows the best practices that an international company can have and stress on having a good and healthy corporate culture. Being an international company and having employees from around 41 nationalities, I realized that intercultural management is a major aspect to be considered by all companies to retain their employees and provide them a good environment to work.

However, as part of future improvement, the company could organize more kick off events instead of having it once in a year to bring in employees from across the globe. Jabmo could also arrange some weekly gathering in each location to allow teams from other departments to interact more or celebrate some major festivals of the country where the branches are located in. This would promote integrity and motivate employees to give their best at work.

TRIPOD ANALYSISExternal analysis – Porter’s 5-forces frameworkIntroductionWith the increasing demand of new technologies and trends in the current era, one of the major threats to any business, whether it is a big established organization, or a start-up is Competition. It is crucial for any business to find out who are its competitors. It is also important to understand how their actions can affect their current position in the market place and their plan for future. So, to analyze all this, using Porter’s Five Forces model is an effective tool to access the industry in which you are operating. It is a great strategic model to review the strength of a market sector on a global view. This model identifies 5 key forces and understand how each of these forces can determine whether a business can be profitable or not in the Account based execution software (ABM) industry.

Threat of new entrantsFactors possibly affecting the threat of new entrants (= barriers to entry)
  PRESENT FUTURE
Legal and regulatory barriers Yes Yes
Capital requirements Yes Yes
Economies of scale Yes Yes
Product/service differentiation Yes Yes
Experience curve Yes Yes
When a new entrant in businesses brings innovation, and improved services or products that adds more pressure and bring in more competition in the Account based marketing industries. This can be through reduced costs, better pricing strategy and better value proposition to the customers. Hence Account based marketing execution software industries must handle such challenges and prepare effective strategies to ensure they have competitive edge in the market.

Legal and regulatory barriers are high within the industry. Due to the European GDPR law and data protection and privacy acts in many countries, many new entrants must bear numerous regulators to ensure that the customers’ information and their data is completely protected. This can be a long and difficult process especially if it deals with Account based marketing solutions wherein products are built to pull sensitive information like clicks, IPs or cookies. This gets more complex to be GDPR Compliant. The new entrants also must ensure that their product abides by all the legal requirements and conduct auditing processes before selling it to their customers. In future, with new acts and regulation on data protective, it would get more challenging for any new entrant to enter this industry and make a name for themselves.

Products or services differentiation is another factor to be considered as a threat for any new entrant. Lead generation has been a part of marketing for quite a long time. Also, companies who have been in the Account based marketing execution software industry for a long time have constantly been innovating new products and services. Hence it is quite challenging for new entrant to compete against these factors and must make sure their product is unique or has better value addition for their customers. So, innovation is essential. Building new products and features not only brings new customers but also retains old customers and gives them a reason to buy Account based marketing products.
Economies of scale can be another threat to any new entrant in this industry. So, they must focus on building economies of scale to lower the fixed cost per unit.
Capital requirement is also a key factor to be considered while entering into this market. New entrants would be less interested to enter an industry which is quite dynamic and evolving where the well-known players keep defining the standards regularly. It not only discourages new entrants but reduces their chances of earning extraordinary profits in the industry. Hence investing money on research and development is the only key to enter into this market and thrive in it.

Experience curve is also important factor to be considered. The new entrant would have to learn from where the well-known players have gone wrong and quickly scale up to avoid these mistakes. In businesses, learning curve and closely related experience curve effect describe the relationship between gain in efficiency and investment in making the effort. If the company has more experience in producing a product, the cost gets lowered. So, businesses that have been there in this industry for long have more advantage compared to a young player and this can be a big threat too.

Threat of substitutes
Factors possibly affecting the threat of substitutes
  PRESENT FUTURE
Service oriented vs Product oriented Yes Yes
Switching cost Yes Yes
Outbound Sales or opportunistic marketing Yes Yes
Usually industry profitability suffers when a new product or service meets similar needs of a customer in different other ways, for example Google drive is a well-known substitute for the hard storage drives. The threat of a substitute is high if when it is unique and has more value addition from what it is being offered currently in the industry.

Customers these days want to invest in products or services that can give them return on investments on a long run. Many companies just focus on building and enhancing their product and in the process, they tend to forget about the core need of the customers. This happens usually with a company that is new in the industry. However, this can work against them. There are many companies who focus on providing services with the help of their customer success and this can be a substitute for the products too. So, one way to tackle the threat of substitute would be to focus on being service oriented rather than product oriented.

Demand Generation can be a major threat of substitute for Account based marketing execution software industry. It refers to generating as many leads as possible based on individuals. In Demand generation, once the lead is measured and qualified, it is continuously nurtured throughout the cycle, building interest in buying the product or service. Then the whole process shifts from the marketing to sales team once the lead has accumulated enough points. Account based marketing is quite opposite of this. Unlike demand generation that tries to market the company’s product to as many individuals as possible, Account based marketing focuses on targeting its audience as whole. Hence although there is a market for Account based marketing software providers, it does not necessarily mean Demand generation is out of the equation or competition and can be substituted any day.

Another factor that might be considered when taking threat of substitutes into consideration would be the switching cost for the customers. Switching cost which simply means the expenses that will be incurred if a customer switches to a different seller will be too high if customer engaged decides to move from using old technologies or substitutes to Account based execution software. They might have to invest for additional services which come with package of managed services along with account-based execution software. For example, when a customer is using other substitutes like Lead Generation, they might be less likely to use Account based marketing execution software simply because of the extra expenses incurred.

Bargaining power of buyersFactors possibly affecting the bargaining power of buyers
  PRESENT FUTURE
Product/service differentiation Account based execution software companies provide additional managed services like website personalization Yes
Buyer competition Yes, as most of the company in this sector are currently targeting US and Asia Not, if they target globally
Size and concentration of buyers relative to sellers Size and concentration of buyers is less It will be high
Ability to backward integrate Customers are either not aware of this concept or are just interested in services It is quite possible
Often buyers seem to demand a lot. They want to get the best services available and pay for it at the minimum price possible. This puts a lot of pressure on account-based execution software industries and their profitability in the long run. Usually, when the customer base is small and yet powerful for an Account based execution software industry, the bargaining power of the customers becomes higher and their chances for asking for discounts and offers gets more.

One of the main factors possibly affecting the bargaining power of buyers is the product or services differentiation. The bargaining power of buyers is high when you try to sell them your product that provides similar features and services as the other competitors. Hence to thrive in this industry it is highly important to focus on differentiating your product and enhance it to attract the customer base. By rapidly innovating new products and adding new features to the available products, the companies can also retain their old customers who might opt out if they find a product that serves their purpose at a cheaper price. Customers often look for discounts and value-added propositions on established products. Therefore, if account-based execution software providers keep on coming up with new product features then it will limit the bargaining power of buyers.

Buyer competition is also a factor that can affect the bargaining power of buyers. Currently the bargaining power of high because the industry targets mainly two regions across the globe – US and Europe. The targeted audience is less in other geographical locations like China, Australia etc. However, if the companies look for creating a larger customer base, it will be very helpful for them. It will not only decrease the bargaining power of the buyers significantly but give an opportunity to the companies to streamline their marketing, sales and production process.

Another factor affecting the bargaining power would be backward integration. This is because the customers may get smarter and diverge their business to merge with the suppliers or the software providers of account-based marketing and develop their own products to integrate in their marketing and sales. This will impact the business of these small or medium size account-based execution software provides heavily. Hence, they should keep improving their product to stay in the market and attract their customers.

Finally, the size and concentration of these buyers in comparison to these sellers are less. So, they can bargain and get the best solution at the best price. This is because most of these players in this industry aim at business to business (B2B) customers and not B2C. Most of these manufacturers are not aware of this new technology or resistant to the idea of this whole new concept. However, in future the market for Account based market is going to be huge and more and more customers are likely to be interested in this market. So, chances are huge that the bargaining of the customers are going to be impacted.

Bargaining power of suppliersFactors possibly affecting the bargaining power of suppliers
  PRESENT FUTURE
Uniqueness and differentiation of the item supplied High High
Supplier competition Competition among supplier is high Competition among supplier Is likely high
Size and concentration of suppliers relative to buyers Size and concentration of suppliers relative to buyers is high Size and concentration of suppliers relative to buyers will be high
Ability to forward integrate No Less likely
Most of the companies in the account-based execution software industry depend on numerous suppliers or vendors who provide license or services for their CRM tools like Salesforce, Microsoft dynamics etc. for integrating their product with these tools. Suppliers who are normally in dominant position can reduce the margins that the account-based software providers industries can earn in the market. Many suppliers in service sectors usually use strong negotiating power and demand higher prices from the firms who depends on their tools and services to build or enhance their product or services. Hence, there is a greater impact of bargaining power of supplier on the overall profitability of these industries like ABM software providers.

There are currently many customer relationship tools that are available in the market. They are huge in demand as many companies rely on them to integrate it to their business. Hence, the suppliers try to make their products as unique as possible to attract the buyers. So, the bargaining power of these suppliers are high and like to remain high in future.

Secondly, there are many suppliers in this market place that offer similar services. Hence there is a huge competition among them with added value in their product and best pricing strategy. This results in low bargaining power for the suppliers. However, in future it is still going to remain the same if these suppliers continue to add new features on their product or build new products to attract more customers. For example, Salesforce is one of the key CRM integration tools available in the market and it is continuously engaged in innovating and coming up with new features and tools like Pardot to attract and retain its buyers.

Again, size and concentration of suppliers relative to buyers is relatively high too. There are many well established players like Salesforce or young players like Marketo, Tableau. Each of these companies try their best to provide services that fit to the customer needs. Hence, they have a dominance in the bargaining power. However, in future, as more and more companies would invest in the Account based execution software industry, this might change.

Ability of the suppliers to integrate forward might also be another factor that could affect the bargaining power of suppliers. Currently and in the future, it is less like to happen as the companies in the ABM execution software industry don’t focus in building these tools to integrate and are happy with buying the license. So, the bargaining power of supplier is high.
Rivalry of established competitorsFactors possibly affecting the rivalry of established competitors
  PRESENT FUTURE
Concentration Medium Yes
Diversity of competitors Yes Yes
Product or service differentiation Yes Yes
There are several factors which can affect the rivalry of established competitors in this industry. Firstly, concentration plays a big role when it comes to rivalry among the competitors. Currently the industry is growing and there are not many established companies in this sector compared to other industries. Most of them are young or have been in the market for four to five years. Hence, the rivalry is not high among the competitors. But in future, this is likely to change.

Another factor that can affect the rivalry of established competitors is the diversity among the competitors. The industry is quite diverse. Some of them are into marketing automation tools while others are into execution and reporting. Some of them provide niche services while other believe in being high performers and provide almost all the services that are available in the market. Hence, we can easily say the diversity among the competitors is quite high in this market and is likely to remain high in future too.

Product or service differentiation can also be a factor that can affect the rivalry of established competitors. The rivalry among established competitors is likely to be high if every company in this industry is keen in investing on innovation and enhancing their product features. If all the companies strive towards making their product unique, it would not only help increase their learning curve but also bring more profitability.
ConclusionPorters Key forces Low/High Force
Threat of new entrants High
Threat of substitutes High
Bargaining power of buyers Medium to high
Bargaining power of suppliers High
Rivalry of established competitors High
To make a conclusion of the analysis, based on the 5-porter’s analysis for the account-based execution software industry, new or potential entrants can understand whether the industry is favorable to make an entry. It also provides the potential entrants an idea about the long-term profitability they can gain if they decide to enter in the industry. Hence it is extremely important for the potential entrants to conduct a market analysis using the 5-Porters’ Analysis.

The table provides a conclusion of the analysis done on the Account based execution software industry based on the Porter 5 forces model. If we have a close look of it, most of the key factors are quite high. Hence, we can conclude that the industry is quite competitive and to thrive and have a position in the market place, it is very important to focus on your product and its features and ensure it stayed updated and provide better value additions to have a competitive edge and stay successful.

There are a few successful players in this field. So, in the end, we might also want to know how well these companies perform in their sector based on the customer satisfaction and market presence. The Grid prepared by G2crowd website shows us a clear picture of who are the leader and have a great market presence in the industry, who are highly appreciated by users or who are not quite satisfactory as per users.

Internal analysis – Barney’s VRIO frameworkIntroductionTo understand the competitive advantages and weaknesses of Jabmo, we need to understand the resources that the company uses. To do this, we use the Barney’s VRIO model.

The VRIO model is a strategic analysis tool developed to help companies analyze their resources and capabilities and protect them to have a long-term competitive advantage.

The framework stands for Value, Rareness, Imitability and Organization. These four components are defined as below:
Valuable: Does your company offer a resource that adds value for its customers? If yes, and the value is established, then you can move on to the next VRIO component. If not, you are at competitive disadvantage and need to access your resource and capabilities again to uncover its value.

Rarity: Does your company own something that is very hard to find and yet in demand? If no, the resource is valuable yet common. Lack of rarity can put the position of your company in competitive parity. If yes and your resource is found to be rare, then move on to the next component which is Imitability
Imitability: Does your company offer any resource that is difficult to be duplicated or expensive and cannot be substituted to compete with it? If yes, the resource is valuable, rare and hard to imitate. If no, you have a temporary competitive advantage.

Organizational Embeddedness: Does your company have well organized management systems and structures to capitalize on the resources and capabilities? If yes, the company has achieved the goal of sustainable competitive advantage. If no, you have an unused competitive advantage and might need to re-access your resources again.

VRIO resources and competencesResource or competence Valuable? Rare? Difficult to
imitate? Organizational embeddedness? Competitive implication Economic implication
Tangible
CRM Integration Yes No No Yes Temporary competitive advantage Normal
Personalized and customized Products Yes Yes No Yes Temporary competitive advantage Above normal
Large service range Yes No No Yes Competitive parity Normal
Global distribution network Yes Yes No Yes Temporary competitive advantage Above Normal
Content and creative preparationYes Yes Yes Yes Sustainable Competitive Advantage Above normal
Data repository Yes Yes Yes Yes Sustainable Competitive Advantage Above normal
Intangible
Research and development Yes Yes Yes Yes Sustainable Competitive Advantage Above normal
Loyal customer base Yes No Yes Yes Competitive parity Normal
Location of head office and branches Yes No Yes Yes Competitive parity Normal
Worldwide Presence Yes No Yes Yes Competitive parity Normal
Human Capital Yes Yes No Yes Temporary competitive advantage Above normal
Technical competencies Yes Yes Yes Yes Sustainable Competitive Advantage Above normal
Customer experience Yes Yes No Yes Temporary competitive advantage Temporary to Normal
Innovation to new products or services Yes Yes Yes Yes Sustainable Competitive Advantage Above normal
To explain the above, the resources and competences of Jabmo are divided into two major groups, Tangible and intangible.

In terms of the Tangible resources, we understand that there is a temporary competitive advantage for personalized and customized product or services. When a customer is opting for Jabmo product or managed services as a package, it makes sure that the customer gets the services that they want. It does so by helping a customer personalize their content, campaigns or advertisements to target their right audience. Jabmo also focuses on its customers and is always trying to ensure customer is satisfied with the product. It achieves so by using a Customer Relationship Management or CRM approach in its corporate business strategy. This approach integrates well with its personalization strategy and allows Jabmo to capture data on its loyal customers as well as the new ones. In doing so, Jabmo often exclusive offers and excellent protection plans to its customers. This has proven to be a great success. However, this can be easily imitated by its competitors and therefore is not a longer temporary advantage. Jabmo also provides many managed services like integration or installation with user manuals, which can easily attract any customer to buy its product as every customer expects user friendly as easy to use products these days. They don’t want to bear the burden of installing the product and testing it or get into any hassle. Although these resources are very valuable to the company, it can be easily intimated by the competitors in future. Other competitors like Marketo or Terminus also provide many services along with their product too which might not be like us. Global distribution network is another tangible resource which is very valuable to the company. Being a young company, Jabmo has around 100 clients across the globe. This has been extremely valuable and profitable to the company and has become a longer temporary competitive advantage to the company.

Content and creative preparation method has also proven to be successful and therefore it has become a sustainable competitive advantage for the company. The company focuses heavily in making the best content and creatives possible for all its clients to target maximum audience possible for these clients. Lastly, Data repository is one of the key resources that has been very valuable for the company not only for day to day operations but for building analytics for the board meetings or presenting Quarterly business reviews. Jabmo has a vast data dictionary and repository that has information of all its clients and their target audience. With this data, the product tries to use account sensing to find the target audience of each client and engage in sending personalized services like emails or advertisements. This resource will always act as a sustainable competitive advantage for the company.

Regarding the intangible resources and competences, it is divided into competitive parity, temporary competitive advantage and sustainable competitive advantage. Firstly, research and development are valuable for any company. The company invests heavily in continuous research and development for its product. It is valuable, rare and a sustainable competitive advantage for the company. Secondly, the company has over 100 clients and they been spread across the globe. This gives the company a competitive edge as most of the companies in this industry are focused on US market. Hence a large customer base wide spread in many locations can be considered valuable and sustainable competitive advantage. Another resource that is quite valuable to the company is the location of head office. Jabmo has its head office location in Paris. Paris is considered as the second biggest city in the world in terms of business and development. Being in a business hub like Paris, it gets easier for the company to attract more customers and generate revenue. Therefore, the geographical location of the head quarter is also an asset to the company. However, it is not rare as many marketing software provided are also located around the city too. Jabmo has its branches in 4 different locations. Having offices in places like Mauritius where Jabmo can take advantage of hiring employees at less wages benefits the company a lot. It is also located in Madison, US where the market for ABM solutions is high. So, the strategy of the company to build offices in places where there is a market for their product or countries where you can get best employees at lesser wage acts to their advantage. Human Capital is also very valuable for the company as they have the skill set and expertise to conduct business with the customers and they can build a healthy working relationship with their customers. The company therefore, continuously tries to hire and retain its employees with the various benefits like providing quarterly bonus and health benefits for them. The company also provides an opportunity for the employees to have internal transfers to the other branches where the company is located the chance to have an internal rotation makes it flexible for the staffs to work from anywhere and be more productive. They also get a chance understand the business better by working with teams from those locations. Although, currently it is handled quite well by the company, but it is possible that Jabmo might have a chance to lose some of its employees to the competitors who are probably better at managing them. So, this is a temporary competitive advantage for the company. Having and flourishing a good technical competency is highly important for any company. Jabmo invests a lot in hiring third party companies to conduct workshops within the organization to train its staffs with the latest technologies in the market that can be used to enhance the product and services. This is very valuable to the company and its staffs in terms of the learning curve. Customer success is another values resource that the company tries to invest in to retain its clients. The customer success team is very committed in helping all the clients of the company when there an issue with installation is or using the managed services. The company also uses analytical tools like Tableau to provide meaningful insights to the clients like monitoring the performance of the product and providing information about their accounts’ engagement. This is valuable and difficult to imitate too. Lastly, Jabmo has always been encouraging its employees to act as owners and focus on innovation. By innovating new products or adding new features, the company can have a competitive edge over others in the market. The company arranges weekly product update meetings where the technical and product team sits together with customer success and brainstorms on the new features that can be developed. All these intangible assets are very valuable to the company and some of them can re-accessed and tuned better in future if the company wants these resources to be sustainable competitive advantage for it.

ConclusionThe VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability and Organization) model can be considered as a useful tool to describe and categorize the various resources of Jabmo. It helped us to analyze the essential resources and how the company can make efficient decisions to utilize them and embed them in the organization. With regards to Jabmo, I am sure that the company has many resources and competences in its pool, which can be well organized and managed in a way that both clients and employees appreciate and want to be associated with the company. The current resources are highly valuable, and the organizational should make more efforts to determine if they are rare or difficult to imitate to be successful in future.

Institutional analysis
IntroductionTo understand the company’s performance, it is essential to perform an institutional analysis. This gives an overview of how the company follows the rules and regulations. The Regulatory, Normative and Cognitive pillars provide a direction for the behaviors of both the company and individuals.

Regulatory pillarThere are various stakeholders who impose rules and regulations on the company such as Government and other regulatory bodies. The company must abide by them. The best example to cite here is the GDPR Law. The General data protection regulation protects the data of EU residents and ensures the data protection law is abided by all member states, making it uniform. It means if a company tries to identify an individual directly or indirectly, the GDPR law will be applied even if they are trying to use this for professional use. So, for example, if the enterprise gets the name and other personal details of a business contact on file or gets their details through the email address, then they can be charged by GDPR law. For account-based marketing industries, the business relies heavily on IP addresses or cookies and clicks. These can pull a huge amount of information about an individual or a company. Hence the company must be GDPR compliant and conduct regular internal audits to ensure that no sensitive information about the clients or the third-party companies are being pulled to carry the business operations. In case, they do that, they might have to pay a huge fine. This can also destroy their brand name in public.

Normative pillarThe normative perspective involves duty and moral obligation for the essential elements what that are essential to drive change. It is about the willingness to use standard practices across the organization. The process facilitators for an account-based marketing software firm would be through its process standards, trainings conducted for its employees, contractors and other stakeholders like clients across the organization. This includes values and norms. Jabmo has its own value system, which believes every person involved in the organization gets a fair chance to prove themselves. Jabmo preaches about team spirit and working towards the same goal as a team.
Cognitive pillarWithin the company, it is the decision of the board of directors to perform business with the companies. To stay competitive, yet compliant with the laws and regulations framed by the government, the company prefers not to work with enterprises who are not GDPR compliant or do not follow the same value system that Jabmo follows. Even though this can impact the company’s revenue and take away more opportunities, it is up to the company’s values whether they want to be with a specific industry.
ConclusionBased on the analysis above, it is concluded that Jabmo is an enterprise which respects the rules, laws and regulations and uses them to guide the firm and individual behavior. Since the enterprise is international is available in 4 different locations, the government and regulators ensure that the company follows the rules across all the locations. The company deals with huge amounts of money and investment that could be used in an efficient way or misused too, therefore, it is very important that the company should try to reduce any uncertainty by conducting all the necessary checks and ensure all the regulations are being abided by. The company believes in having standard practices and norms to satisfy its employees and all the stakeholders involved with the organization. The value system of the company is quite strong, and this can help it to grow exponentially.

Tripod analysis conclusions
In conclusion, the Tripod analysis framework is one of the best frameworks to analyze a company and its industry. The tools that were used in the Tripod analysis above were Porter’s five forces, Barney’s VRIO model and Institutional model.

These tools have provided a strong analysis framework, which covered the different aspects that are consider crucial to build an international strategy.
From the Porter’s 5 forces analysis, the threats of the account-based execution software industry have been analyzed. The threat of new entrants is considered high as the market is growing and there are numerous opportunities within this industry. There is huge scope of innovation in this field. There are many manufacturers and B2B companies who want to invest in this industry.
The threat of substitutes is considered high because there are companies that provide similar services like Lead generation that have been there in the market before. So, if Account based strategy fails in an organization, these substitutes can easily take over the market.
The threat of buyers is medium to high as the concentration of buyers are relatively less compared to the suppliers from this industry. Most of the organizations are not even aware of the Account based marketing. However, it might change in future.

The threat of suppliers of the account-based execution software industry is considered high as there are many companies within this industry as compared to the customers interested in the ABM solution currently. Moreover, the market is highly competitive. The new players as well as the established ones are always engaged in innovating their products and enhancing the product features to attract customers.

The force, rivalry of established competitors is considered the highest among the other key forces of Porter analysis. Competition is not only faced among young players but also with within the established organizations.
Therefore, based on the Porter’s 5 forces model, we can say this might not be favorable industry for new entrants to launch their business now, but it will change in future and any entrant entering this industry can gain a lot of opportunities to grow in their business.

The second part of the analysis is the VRIO (Value, Rare, Imitability, Organizational Embeddedness). This was done for the internal resources and competences of the company-Jabmo. Here the company’s tangible and intangible resources were used to conduct the analysis. The framework analysis helped us to conclude that the company- Jabmo has abundant resources and competences within the organization, and this can be re-accessed and utilized to have a competitive advantage over its competitors;
The final part of the analysis was done from an institutional point of view. The company values, norms and policies were analyzed with the help of the three pillars: the regulatory, the normative and the cognitive pillar. It was noticed that regulators have many regulations that the company must follow or abide by to continue running its day to day operations These policies form the company’s organizational and individual behavior. The normative pillar explains that the company must have standard practices and user manuals which can be framed with the help of meetings, workshops and trainings to frame standard norms and build a value system within the organization that will benefit all the stakeholders involved in it. The cognitive pillar explains that, it is up to the bank’s value system that they choose with what kind of industries they want to be associated with, for example, the company wants to be associated with the enterprises that share the same value system as that of Jabmo
In the end, we can say that, Jabmo has valuable and manageable, tangible and intangible resources, and is trying to access them regularly to build its brand and embed them in the organization. I can conclude that the company is in a good position from the corporate perspective although there is still a window to improve in the future.

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITYStakeholder analysis of the companyCorporate social responsibility is a hot topic today and one that impacts everyone—from your start-ups to mid-size companies to Fortune 50 companies. Everyone is impacted by it. It refers to how a company addresses to the stakeholder expectations by integrating their economic, environmental, and social objectives to sustain or benefit every shareholder involved with the organization externally or internally. In simple words, we can say that CSR is how a company takes responsibility for their actions and how these actions can have a positive effect on the environment and community. Corporate social responsibility can have positive impacts on your business not only being a good name or reputation for the company but also on the employees, external stakeholders and the community.

Jabmo is one of the niche companies in the Account based marketing software industry and has been able to be successful in this competitive market. There are many stakeholders involved too to make it possible. The stakeholders can be divided into four major categories:
Internal stakeholders: They are the ones who are committed towards the growth of the company. They are employees and board of directors.
External stakeholders: They are the ones who are impacted by the company’s business. They are investors, clients, shareholders, external auditors, nonprofit organizations, government and suppliers and vendors providing utilities.

Primary stakeholders: They are the ones who are directly impacted by the company’s decisions. They can be employees, the board of directors, shareholders, advisors, clients and investors.

Secondary stakeholders: They are the ones who are not directly impacted of company’s business. Some of them can be competitors, Government, suppliers, and external vendors.

To determine the influence and of these stakeholders on the company, the 2×2 stakeholder map can be used.

-508662873870influence
00influence
-95416652311
Satisfy Manage
High Influence, Low Interest High Influence, High Interest
Government and regulatory bodies Board of directors, Investors, and leadership team of the company.

Monitor Inform
Low Influence, Low Interest Low Influence, High Interest
Competitors, external vendors and suppliers, nonprofit organizations Shareholders with no involvement in decision making processes, Clients and Employees
39756590142
interest
The table above describes the 2×2 stakeholder map for Jabmo.

The vertical axis stands for the level of influence while the horizontal axis denotes the level of interest. The Government, and the regulating bodies have high influence and low interest. They are the ones who frame rules and regulations that the company must abide by, giving them the influence power. For instance, the GDPR law made by the European government had to be enforced in all the operations at Jabmo and the company had to ensure the customers’ data is protected and their privacy is respected. The investors, shareholders who have the voting rights, board of directors and leadership team of the company have high influence in making decisions for the company. They show greater interests in the business growth of the company. The Shareholders who have no rights in the decision-making process, clients and employees have low influence in the operation of the company. They do have high interest in the services provided by the company. The most important stakeholders for the company are not only the stakeholders, which are high in both power and interest but also the stakeholders with only high power for the reasons explained as below.

Jabmo should always try to keep up with its current strategies to manage the important stakeholders. Since they have high influence and high interest in the company’s internal processes and decision making, it is very crucial for the company to invest more resources in this group and ensure that they are satisfied with the needs. Therefore, it is essential for the company to treat all of them with high respect and ensure that all their needs are being heard and fulfilled too. The company should also put in efforts to ensure the group of stakeholders having high power are kept satisfied and happy. They have the power to influence the company’s operations and thus impact the business growth. The Government regulatory boards especially have the highest influence power from an external point of view as they are the ones who create laws and regulations and make sure the company abides by them in the daily operations. If a company does not invest its resources to make sure the all rules and regulations are met, the regulators have the power to take actions against the company. For instance, all the European companies had to be GDPR compliant before April this year. The government has also framed a GDPR compliance board and agency to audit the companies periodically to ensure they follow the rules and don’t use any customer’s data without their permission. If the company is caught not abiding by it, it can lose its clients, and investors, which adversely affects the brand reputation, thus resulting in loss of revenue. It can be forced to pay a huge fine as part of this law. Hence, although they have less interest, the company must ensure that the regulators and other high influence stakeholders are being taken care of. Employees and other stakeholders who have less power, but interest also must be considered. If the employees are not heard in a company and not provided enough benefits, they might lose interest in working and it might get difficult to retain them.

Description of the adopted CSR-responseBefore talking about the adopted CSR initiatives taken up by Jabmo, I wanted to mention about the hierarchy of responsibilities a company that it must meet if it wants to be socially responsible or wants to invest in it. The vision should start from the making a profit to the contributing towards society well-being.

Economic Responsibilities – A company exists to gain profit for its shareholders. If it does not do so, it will less likely be able to pay the employees or even taxes. Therefore, a well-defined corporate social responsibility program (CSR program) can never be implemented until a company becomes profitable.
Legal Responsibilities – For every business, it is important to follow the law as part of their corporate responsibility. If it does not adhere to labor and tax laws, it cannot benefit the society.

Ethical Responsibilities – Once a company is profitable and meets its legal responsibilities, it can grow up the ladder to ethically responsible, which often includes paying higher salary, offering employees better benefits, avoiding trade with unscrupulous companies or providing jobs to those employees who might have difficulty in finding work.

Philanthropic Responsibilities – Once a business meets its economic, legal and ethical responsibilities, it can consider taking up philanthropic responsibilities. Corporate philanthropy can vary in scope and size and can mean everything from donating to a local charity to building a school or hospital for the needy.

The most important part of corporate social responsibility is the opportunity it can bring to create positive and yet powerful impact in the society.

Since Jabmo is a young company, the company main objective of the company at this stage is to earn profits for its stakeholders. Hence it is difficult to implement a well-defined corporate social responsibility (CSR) program now. However, Jabmo takes the initiative to involve itself in several charities to the community. It organizes monthly charitable programs wherein the employees are encouraged to donate anything they would like to, and this is being donated to the refugees. Apart from this, the company also encourages to donate school stationaries for the students who cannot afford to buy them for their school. This can be a part of the Proactive CSR strategy.

Possible suggestions for future improvementThere are many ways by which young companies like Jabmo can building its CSR Strategy that can make a difference without breaking the bank balance of the company.

The company can introduce some programs where the employees can propose a charity and the rest of the organization must vote for the one they would like to proceed with. By choosing one charity partner to work with every year, the company can ensure that all the fundraising efforts are being channelized into one place and the business will be able to reach its targets faster
To draw up a comprehensive CSR strategy you will need to appoint a dedicated team who are willing to donate a little bit of extra time outside of working hours.

The company can also consider using employees’ skills set as part of its CSR strategy. It can engage some of its web developers for a day or two to help create or revamp the website for a chosen charity that has no online presence and promote them in social media
As more and more companies are trying to ensure there is a fair chance given to all the women in the organization, Jabmo can also look for brining in some programs on Women empowerment. This space can work towards creating more work opportunities for women, hiring female staffs as many as men.

Partnering with blood donation camps and encouraging staffs to donate blood can be another idea to contribute to the community.

It does not end here. Jabmo can try to environment friendly too. This is also an economic and effective way of giving back to the environment and the community. Everyday a lot of employees use print outs for their work and waste papers. These papers don’t often get recycled and are dumped as garbage. Not only this, the plastic cups used for drinking water is finally dumped as garbage too. This can be stopped if employees bring their own water bottles. Jabmo can encourage its staffs to use paper wisely and even better propose to stop using paper for printouts and use digital copies.
Finally, a strong commitment towards corporate social responsibility programs can enhance a company’s brand. As the world gets to know about a company’s good works, it can create a positive working environment, increase sales and even attract committed and desirable employees. In the end, everyone can benefit when companies try to focus on social responsibility.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AND SELF-ASSESSMENTTechnical competences acquiredThroughout this internship at Jabmo, I was able to enhance both my hard and soft skills that helped me do better at my job. Since my role demanded me do conduct a lot of analysis, I was able to gain a lot of hard skills and equip myself with some technical skill set like Microsoft excel, Tableau and Salesforce. In terms of my hard skills, I was able to automate a lot of internal process using excel which were manually executed before and were prone to manual error. Using various excel formulas and pivots saved me a lot of time in preparing my reports and allowed me to deliver my tasks on time. Even though the university conducted excel classes in our curriculum, it was not that useful until I was involved in the actual work. Getting trained in Tableau during my internship helped me to create dashboards that could give meaning information and better insights to the customers and leadership team. I would like to thank my supervisor who always encouraged me to take up new trainings and leverage them at work.

Besides this, i was not able to understand the core business functions. As a result, it was very challenging for me to prepare any analysis or predict how the existing stats can be improved. Working closely with my supervisor, team and various other departments help me to train myself in understanding the business domain. This in return help me to slowly use this knowledge in the tasks I was working on. The weekly product updates gave me a clear idea of what the product is and how it serves the customers. I was able to gain insights on how the how the sales funnel work and how the customer success aligns with them to serve the clients better. As my previous experience was related to IT and consultancy, studying the marketing concepts in the university along with the hands-on training gained during my internship, I have now learned how important data is and how it can be channelized to get better insights on the market to perform better. I now understand the product better and how digital marketing can play a big role in attracting and selling it to the customers.

On one hand, where hard skills helped me to do my daily routine tasks, the soft skills that I gained during the internship helped me in my personal development.
To begin with, my communication skills were enhanced. As I had daily communication with my managers and leadership team, I was able to learn the business and its language better. Being involved in quarterly review meeting and presenting my analysis helped me to improve my presentation skills. Initially, I was not able to express myself clearly due to lack of business knowledge and hence unable to give any scope for information with regards to any statistical data. But over the time, I gained some understanding of the business and this helped me a lot not only for pulling out required data for the updates, but I was also able to give suggestions on how we can perform better in certain areas. For example, I used to pull weekly email stats from Pardot. But over the time I was also able to let the digital marketing specialist know we did not perform well in email marketing due to various reasons like the account is still not set up at a target account or campaigns were not created for certain clients etc.

For an analyst position, it is crucial to be detailed-oriented. It is necessary that no important information is missed. Even with my previous experiences, I have learnt to be detail-oriented, being part of a consultancy firm. However, the internship helped me to enhance this skill more. As there was vast amount of information and data provided from various sources, like Salesforce, command center etc. there was a lot of analysis required. In my opinion, there is more room for improvement as there were instances when I had overlooked some details for and my supervisor assisted me to correct the figures. However, the overall experience did help me grow more observant while running any analysis for the business.

Another area that I have gained in is being able to be proactive. I am immensely grateful to my supervisor who always encouraged me to think out of the box and let me work individually. I was initially hesitant to take up a task by myself and used to ask for guidance for every step I took. However, my supervisor trained me well to be able to be confident in handling any tasks I was given. Gradually I was able to provide information which might be important in future even if I was not asked for. This was highly appreciated by my manager and I felt more committed in working at Jabmo. I was always dependent on my bosses to take any action if some situation arises. However, at Jabmo, I became more confident and proactive with the help and guidance of my team.

Managerial competences acquiredDuring my internship, my supervisor took a month’s leave due to some emergencies. I had to juggle between my tasks and his tasks too. I was able to make a list of all the tasks required to be performed in a day and tried to deliver as per the deadlines. I had no one to assist me during this time. And there were many instances when the leadership team came back asking me for my feedback or they had questions related to the analysis. However, thanks to my supervisor who had trained me so well, I was able to answer all their questions on time and did not seek any help from others.

There was also an instance, where there was not much work for me. So, I reached out to my supervisor to give me some tasks to do. He had some pending projects and he gave me the responsibility to handle it. I worked on it individually and delivered it to the team that needed it. Both my manager and the team that had asked for the task to be done were very happy with my performance. Although there have been small issues here and there, my boss and my colleagues have always encouraged and help me out whenever I needed support, and this kept me motivated to perform my daily and ad-hoc tasks better.

I would like to thank my supervisor from whom I was able to gain insights on how a good manager should be. He always had clear objectives for me since I joined the company and continued to monitor my performance through feedbacks and where I needed to improve.

Relational and intercultural competences acquired There have been several occasions where I needed to depend on other teams to get inputs for conducting my tasks and deliver them to the management. Many times, the other departments were busy or took time in providing the desired information. Initially some of them were even hesitant to help me out as they did not trust me or knew me well. However, working with them over time, I was able to build a good relationship with them. Gradually, they started count on me and I was able to get the reports that I wanted from them on time. This shows how important it is building a healthy and good relationship with your colleagues at office.

Taking intercultural competences into consideration, as Jabmo is quite international and diverse, I got a chance to meet some of the people who were from diverse background. Jabmo has around 40-50 nationalities working for the company. And this gave me a big opportunity to work with them, learn about their culture and understand how to handle some of the challenges that you can have when you interact or work with someone of different culture. The weekly Share and Learn programs conducted by the Human resources on the culture of every country where Jabmo is located also helped me understand how they work and how to deal with them better. I also got many opportunities to interact with my colleagues who were from different cultural background during coffee breaks and learn about their culture too. This helped me in understanding them better whenever I got a chance to work with them. Overall, it was quite interesting for me to corelate the diverse background at office with the subject Intercultural management taught in the university.

Contribution given to the organizationIn my opinion, I give the credit to my university to train me well with the courses in the curriculum, my supervisor and my manager who encouraged me to leverage this knowledge at work and my team to support whenever I had some issues. I not only developed my professional skills through the work and trainings provided within the company, but I also have a strong sense of commitment towards working in the same field in future. During my internship, I had the opportunity to not only perform analysis and provide reports to the leadership team, I was also able to assist my team in running email and social media campaigns. This gave me an opportunity to learn how digital marketing is done in an organization. The weekly team discussion gave me insights on the issues that the marketing team faces and how they handle it.

Other than this, taking up projects from the other team helped me understand how they perform. I assisted the Sales research team in coming up with a master client list in Salesforce. This was a huge success and the team acknowledged my hard work put into that work. Occasionally several teams reached out to me to automate their manual work in excel. This also improved my excel skills and I was proud I can contribute to the organization in some ways.

I am grateful that I got an opportunity to work in a diverse work environment at Jabmo. I realized I have gained a lot through this internship personally and professionally. This will help me in my future endeavors.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONSThe internship allowed me to gain a lot of exposure into the marketing field. Even though I never got a chance to work in marketing with the previous company, my internship gave me that experience and allowed me to learn more about the marketing concepts. It gave me the opportunity to use my skills that I had earned so far and helped to stay updated with new technologies and current trends that are being used in Marketing. I believe with this knowledge gained during internship, I can look forward in specializing in the account-based marketing domain too.

Thanks to the internship opportunity with Jabmo, I am now more motivated and committed to look out for opportunities in this field and build my career in it.

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