Scott asked me a very good question in response to my post on segmenting your market.
The execution question though is HOW do you scientifically locate as many of those that make up the selection criteria? Internally we call these perfect prospects "Zebra's"... each stripe is a valued characteristic that we are looking for in a prospect... yes, attitudinal segmentation.
Our struggle is database filtering to focus our limited sales and marketing time of connecting to these candidates. Any advise?
Yes, I always have something to say. The beauty of this approach is that you don't have to "locate" your segments. If done right, they will come to you. My recommendation is that you focus on:
- Driving your potential customer population to your Web property -- specifically, the area where you will be doing offer fulfillment.
- Once on your property, I recommend walking a visitor thru a customer self-qualification tool so that the customer self-segments themselves into the appropriate attitudinal segment. Along the way, you will learn enough about the individual and their organization (thru a series of 7-10 questions) to predict segment membership.
- Once they've given you the information to perform a segmentation, you as an organization MUST provide something of value back to the customer/prospect (usually in the form of content). Why? This is a value for value exchange -- they have given you priceless information about themselves you in turn must give them best or next practice information that will help them succeed in their role.
Once they've self-segemented then you can then personalize the web experience for them and provide further offers that will resonate with them - if you find that they are ROI motivated for instance, you can offer tools and data to help build a business case. If they are tech innovative, you can offer content on the technological merits of your solution.
Finally, what should you do with existing customers who present cross- and up-sell opportunities? Well, enterprises young and old tend to know a decent amount about existing customers. So an attitudinal segmentation strategy can be employed without having to have customers self-segment. Depending on your business, someone or something should know enough firmographics and attitudinal data to predict segment membership. You can build an attitudinal gear box for instance and have your Sales personnel answer key questions on their customer's behalf. If they don't know enough to answer the questions, what are they doing in your business? I've seen companies build a segmentation gear box to take their data, and divide into customer segments with 70% accuracy. Thats a seriously good-enough segmentation for any go-to-market initiative.
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