Strategy question
You work at a refrigeration company. How would you expand into the business market?
- Asana
- Strategy
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests B2B market expansion strategy for a company pivoting from consumer to business customers, requiring the candidate to identify what actually changes about the buyer and sales motion.
How to approach it
- Clarify the target segment: restaurants and grocery stores needing commercial refrigeration, versus offices needing smaller break room units, since needs and sales cycles differ sharply.
- Identify what's different about business buyers: longer sales cycles, procurement processes, and a focus on total cost of ownership (reliability, maintenance contracts) over upfront price alone.
- Segment the market by refrigeration need: high-volume, high-uptime commercial kitchens versus lower-stakes office or retail break room units, since willingness to pay for reliability differs.
- Propose a go-to-market motion suited to B2B: a direct sales team or channel partnerships with commercial kitchen equipment distributors, rather than consumer retail channels.
- Address the product shift: bundling maintenance and uptime guarantees as part of the offering, since business buyers weigh downtime risk heavily, unlike typical consumer buyers.
- Define success as contract value and renewal rate rather than unit sales volume alone.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real shift from consumer to B2B, longer sales cycles and total cost of ownership focus, rather than treating this as just a bigger version of consumer sales.
- Segments by refrigeration criticality (commercial kitchen versus office break room), since these have very different willingness to pay for reliability.
- Uses illustrative numbers as assumptions: assume commercial kitchen downtime costs a business meaningfully more per day than a home unit failure, justifying a premium maintenance offering.
- Proposes a B2B-appropriate go-to-market motion, direct sales and distributor partnerships, rather than a consumer retail channel.
Common mistakes
- Treating B2B expansion like scaling up the existing consumer sales motion without changes.
- Not addressing the longer B2B sales cycle and procurement process.
- Ignoring maintenance and uptime guarantees, which matter far more to business buyers than typical consumers.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you price a maintenance contract alongside the hardware?
- What's your sales cycle length assumption and how does that affect hiring?
- How would you pilot this before a full B2B launch?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop