Segmentation Your Sales Team Will Own

Create segmentation schemes for your team's success utilizing primary market research by Actionable Research.

If you can engage your sales team in creating your target audience segmentation, you can do marketing like a boss.

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Creating effective segmentation schemes for our clients is a topic near and dear to our hearts. Although we find the resulting segmentations extremely valuable and rich in marketing insights, we frequently hear that our clients experience challenges while integrating them into existing sales processes.

Over time, we have noted which segmentation schemes are more successful and “actionable” than others, and why. It has much less to do with the efficacy of the segmentation and more to do with the composition (in terms of departmental diversity) and involvement level of our client’s stakeholder team.

To be clear, we are not saying our clients are responsible for a failed segmentation research effort. Here we are pointing out there is a clear correlation between the actual use of a segmentation scheme we would develop and the client side team attributes above.

 

Marketing Department-Only Developed Segmentation Research is DOA

Marketing and product managers are typically the most involved stakeholders for segmentation efforts, and for good reason. Segmentation increases marketing efficiency, and frequently offers a more rapid path to prospect qualification. These benefits are tangible in the marketing department because they enable targeted messaging with less need for individualization.

For more on this topic, please see our recent blog post here

The benefits to a sales team, however, are less obvious. Sales teams and managers frequently view these segmentation schemes with reactions ranging from mild skepticism to outright rejection, because they find it difficult to see how segmentation can improve sales efficiency and closing ratios. Doesn’t a wider consumer base lead to higher sales percentages? No. In fact, success ratios are higher when sales and marketing are finely focused.

We have found that involving sales teams in the development of segmentation schemes significantly boosts their utility for sales profiling and their perceived value to the team. Sales management and influential senior sales staff, who often have more direct involvement with your customer base, become co-authors of the segmentation. They will offer useable insight into the development process.

 

Giving Field Sales Reasons to Believe

Your customers are viewing your product or service with the goal of solving their problems. They are weighing your offerings against the competitive solutions available. Only believable value propositions which offer them tangible advantages will be considered viable. Likewise, your sales team must have reasons to believe that a segmentation will offer them increased opportunities for success. Otherwise, they will not approach the segment enthusiastically; they may even dismiss it altogether.

Reasons to believe given to sales teams regarding segmentation are as follows:

  • The segmentation offers the ability to qualify my prospects more quickly, helping me invest my time more efficiently.
  • The segmentation offers the ability to tailor effective verbal messages which will more frequently change behavior and increase purchase intent.
  • The segmentation offers the ability to formulate better planning by structuring meetings around themes, characteristics, or particular product offerings.

When marketing explains how these benefits will become tangible to the sales team, the collaborative segmentation development process begins.

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What Real Collaborative Sales Team Involvement Looks Like

Since the development of a customized segmentation frequently involves a primary research effort, we recommend their formal involvement in the original questionnaire development. Beginning with the initial hypotheses to the final approval of the survey instrument or interview guide fielded to build segmentation, the sales team must be actual contributors and collaborators.

 True project collaboration involves the following minimum measures:

  • Formal teams must be created through deliberate invitation. Project goals are clearly communicated at the onset to all members, and team members understand and agree to participation and accountability.
  • Regular meetings are scheduled to discuss hypotheses, strategies, and expectations. Segmentation development meetings become a priority; attendance is mandatory, as is participation.
  • Once strategies are in place, all viable feedback is assimilated and integrated into the model, giving the entire team ownership and responsibility.
  • Throughout the development and implementation of the project, regular progress updates are sent to all team members, inviting further input whenever necessary.

Involvement in information collection implies ownership, and ownership is the key to increasing one’s intent and motivation to use the resulting data as it was designed.

 

Actionable Research and Advanced Segmentation

Actionable Research can assist with this critical process, taking your teams from hypothesis development, through fielding and analysis, to complete persona development. 

Like a Boss.

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