Tuesday, April 14, 2009

7 Principles for Actionable, Needs-based Segmentation, # 6

Step 6: Validate your Segmentation Model and your Hypotheses

 

Suppose that as a result of your segmentation analysis, you’ve developed such hypotheses as this: “Quick response, combined with a limited number of face-to-face visits, supported by telephone support for the account management combined with E-mail ordering capability, order tracking and greater use of electronic media for information summary are top priorities for our decentralized customers in the automotive aftermarket in the northeast with annual sales volumes of $50-$150 million.”

 

Before you take action, you’ll want to validate your conclusions. The segmentation model you’ve devised should, first of all, make intuitive sense based on your marketplace experience – and especially on that of your sales and customer service people. Where findings are at issue, you may want to see if customer focus groups, closed on-line communities, or direct contact with the people in your Customer Management Centers confirm them. Timely and rigorous vetting of data hygiene and knowledge transfer come directly into play here. Clearly a great deal rides on having accurate information form which to work.

 

This would be a wonderful opportunity to make sure that you are incorporating that valuable insight now available to us through “social media.” An additional source of insightful wealth on this topic was published in Forrester’s Groundswell. For B2B marketers, their “social technographics profile” provides a superb tool that allows us to map their characteristics into our actionable model and affords us, through the on-going assimilation of knowledge available from the social media, the opportunity to monitor the substantive issues affecting our segmentation and to the course correction every CRM effort expects to need to make – only that much more quickly.

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