From a race to the bottom to a category of one.
How a 20-person B2B carve-out inside a consumer automotive brand rebuilt its go-to-market — from who it targeted to what it stood for — and turned a commodity into a premium.
Blinded — fleet carve-out
B2B commercial vehicles
20 people
GTM transformation
Situation
A 20-person B2B unit had been carved out of a larger consumer automotive brand and told to grow on its own. It inherited a parent built for the showroom floor — and now had to sell to fleet buyers, operations leaders and procurement it had never really spoken to. Everything about how it engaged prospects, from targeting to messaging, needed to change.
Complication
The core message revolved around a low-margin, high-competition category where a dozen vendors looked identical on paper. Price was the only lever anyone reached for. Every deal became an RFP, every RFP a race to the bottom — and a 20-person team could not win a war fought on discount alone.
Resolution
We sat down with the CRO and rebuilt the commercial strategy, messaging and product positioning together — migrating the story off the low-margin, high-competition product and onto a high-margin, low-competition one. The new positioning rested on three levers buyers actually pay for.
Find the blue ocean.
RepositioningThe commodity product was a red ocean — crowded, bloody, priced to zero. So we stopped competing in it. We reframed the same fleet around outcomes procurement is measured on, moving the conversation from unit price to total value and lifting the team into a category with far fewer credible competitors.
Fewer incidents, lower liability, drivers home on time — the metric a fleet director reports upward.
Total cost of ownership across the life of the vehicle, not the number on the invoice at signing.
A credible path to fleet emissions targets — increasingly a board-level mandate, not a nice-to-have.
Before & after the message.
Positioning shift- Target
Anyone buying a vehicle
- Category
Commodity vehicle supplier
- Core message
“Reliable vehicles at a competitive price.”
- Wins on
Price
- Target
Enterprise fleet operators & procurement
- Category
Fleet performance partner
- Core message
“Safer, cheaper to run, and on the path to your emissions targets.”
- Wins on
Total value & margin
How we got there.
The engagementDiagnose
CRO working sessions, win/loss review and a hard look at who actually paid a premium.
Reposition
Named the blue-ocean category and built the three-lever narrative: safety, savings, sustainability.
Retarget
Redrew the ICP around enterprise fleets and built a named-account list the reps could work.
Activate
Rolled the message across sales enablement and a focused conference motion that finally paid back.
What changed.
ResultsEnterprise-fit accounts entering the funnel, not just more of the same low-value leads.
Marquee fleet operators the team could never have reached with a price-led pitch.
A once-flat event budget turned into a measurable, repeatable pipeline channel.