Segmentation - Getting To No

Sales is all about getting to "yes". Marketing is all about getting to "no".

As counter intuitive as that sounds, think about it. Sales people are charged with turning prospects into customers by getting them to say "yes" to your products and services. With marketing the goal is to get qualified leads (prospects) into the sales channel.

To do that, your marketing team needs to sort through the sea of potential customers to identify, target, and qualify only those market segments that ultimately may want and have the resources to purchase your wares.

In other words, disqualifying large portions of the available market to qualify your most likely prospects. Your marketing team needs to say "no" to certain segments so your sales teams can get to "yes" with the rest.

I first saw this put into practice years ago as a young marketing manager overseeing my company's lawn care marketing. After a careful analysis of our customer database, we discovered specific segments that consistently purchased and repurchased our products - regardless of geography.

Using this information and the marketing tools we had at the time, I launched a lead generation direct mail campaign into a target city in Florida, aiming at zip codes and neighborhoods that best matched our existing customers.

Not being familiar with the metro area I did not know how many of our current buyers actually lived in the targeted zip codes. Turns out, we inadvertently hit uncharted territory.

I can still recall the local branch manager's absolute surprise at the new leads they were receiving from neighborhoods that his sales team had never before penetrated. The marketing team brought the leads in and the sales team turned them into revenue producing customers. From that day forward, I was sold on the power of segmentation.

The interactive marketing tools available today are a far cry from the direct mail campaigns of the 1990's, thank goodness. Immensely measurable, simple to change, and quick to create, tools such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), pay-per-click advertising, or web site display ads allow you stretch your marketing dollars and hone in on those segments that may say "yes" to your products, converting them into a lead.

Given the economic fall out of the past couple of years, mid-sized companies are really pressed to deploy their limited sales and marketing dollars into segments that should be their most profitable or hold the best potential for growth. How are you doing with segmentation at your company?

Get Going.

Before the week is out, take the time to do some simple analytical work on your current customer base. Think about how you can segment those customers that are or should be buying from you:

• How can you segment or break down both your customers or your sales channels into different groups?
  
• Specifically, how is each different from one another? Is it they way they buy, the reasons they buy, how often they buy, or how much they buy?
  
• Which segment gives you the best margins?
  
• What motivates each segment to make a decision on a product like yours?
  
• Given that, what makes your specific product or service stand out versus your competitor - what is it that your company brings to this market segment?
  
• What key words or adjectives describe how your company, product, or service stands outs to these segments? How are you working those key words into your on-line and off-line marketing tools?
  
• What assumptions about these market segments, as they relate to your product categories, may have changed over the last two years since the start of the Great Recession? Has the recession created a potentially new segment for your company?

And finally, based on questions above what three changes could you make this week to allocate your marketing funding to focus on saying "yes" to profitable segments and getting to "no" with the others?