It’s almost time to say goodbye to 2011, and to things that worried us this year. Judging from our conversations, many of you spent the year tweaking your segmentation strategies. If only segmenting was as simple as they teach in Marketing 101! The problem marketers face with textbook-ish methods of segmentation is that they’re, well, suited to the textbook world.

While segmentation can be approached in many ways, some of MLC’s members have evolved best-in-class winning segmentation strategies that have propelled them to success. Presented below are a couple of strategies our members have used to segment their customers and consumers. The key take-away, as you read through these examples is that these are simple to enforce, yet innovatively different ways to segments your customers and consumers. Read More »

Many brands want to offer their customers an individualized shopping experience, so they offer products like design-your-own Kleenex boxes and personalized M&Ms.   These products give an infinite number of possibilities: you can choose your own colors, upload photos, write catchy sayings.  In essence, they give you exactly what you want.

But in a world with far too many decisions, simpler can be (and often is) better.  With fewer choices, consumers can be much happier and far less likely to divert from the purchase path.  But in the real world, it is almost impossible for brands to significantly reduce the number of options they provide.

So furniture retailer La-Z-Boy decided to take a different approach that gives the consumer a more streamlined shopping experience: in-store segmentation.  The furniture-maker realized its customers craved individualization, so – through a needs-based segmentation strategy – it gave them exactly that. Read More »

As companies have gotten bigger in the last few decades, so have their marketing plans. Many B2B companies have transitioned to solutions selling – and according to data from the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of sales, in 2005 75% of large enterprises aspired to selling solutions, rather than products per se. For big companies, this can be a difficult shift – on the sales rep side, you have to spend serious time educating reps on new products, as well as how to think broadly about how individual products fit into an overarching solution; on the customer side, reps now have to deal with an explosion of stakeholders, each with a vested interest in the problem the solution is supposed to solve.

As you can expect, this leads to some growing pains. But Johnson Controls’ Ideation Workshop is a simple and innovative way to streamline solutions selling – one that ultimately left them with significantly higher average deal size, a shorter sales cycle, and detailed information about the common challenges faced by customer segments. Read More »

Were you at Dreamforce in early December?  If you’re like 30,000 other people (and many MLC members) the answer is yes.  If you’re like me, the answer is… not exactly.  We were busy writing our surveys on customer behavior (B2B members, it’s not too late to get great insight into your customers for free—just email me at <freemank at executiveboard dot com> if you would like more information, or take a look at this document).  As a result, I had to attend virtually.

Thankfully, it is pretty much fully available online, so I’m fully prepared to offer 3 marketing trends observed from Dreamforce – with MLC resources to help you get after them – as well as my opinion about the most interesting salesforce.com announcement for B2B marketers. Read More »

The worldwide recession has changed the value set for a significant portion of your customer base.  By the day, we’re hearing of more members recasting their segmentation models to reflect new realities.  But updating segments is only half the battle.  To see frontline impact with new segmentation, marketers must get the new segments to “stick” with internal stakeholders.

Not long ago, LG Mobile developed a new segmentation model.  Marketing leaders at LG Mobile quickly realized that to engage consumer segments more effectively, they needed to embed these segments into everything that LG’s employees do. Marketing leaders began by asking themselves the question- Is the segmentation understandable, relatable and relevant? Taking this as a starting point, LG worked to sell the segmentation internally. LG followed a 5-step process to create an internal buy-in of the segmentation. Read More »

Continuing a very episodic series on how some things might be bottle-necked, my next observation is around the number of key accounts that a company manages at any point in time.

This observation comes from a study of key account managers in 2006 that surveyed key account managers from 53 large companies.  The study found that, while all companies tier customers, they also tend to limit the number of accounts that fit the description: “a customer relationship that is deemed significant to your company’s long-term growth because of that customer’s current and/or expected financial, learning or strategic value”.  Specifically, the number of true key accounts tends to cluster around the 15- to 20-mark, irrespective of the company’s industry segment. That was a surprise, since we expected certain firms (like the delivery industry) to engage with a much larger number of accounts given their routine interactions with 100,000s of customers. Read More »

The case for better Sales and Marketing alignment is pretty obvious to most Marketers—selling and marketing in concert stands to yield much better results than doing them each independently.  Unfortunately, what actually leads to good Sales and Marketing alignment has eluded most of us for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data on the topic for a few months now, and have come across a couple of admittedly simple but thought provoking findings: Read More »

A recently released report by Gallup underscores how difficult it is for marketers today to know where to focus their efforts.  The report, which is based on a survey of US consumers’ retail shopping behavior (and includes some really interesting data on the engagement premium), at first suggests that success lies in the quality of customer service efforts and ease of shopping—both very functional aspects of the retail experience.  But three paragraphs later, the authors argue that retailers’ most effective strategy is to build an emotionally engaging experience. 

Well, which is it?  Of course, we’d all like to have an experience that is as good as can be, both functionally and emotionally.  However, we as marketers have limited time and financial resources.  We appreciate advice that steers us on how to prioritize. 

So, here is MLC’s take on how to make those tradeoffs.  Read More »