Helping your business to focus
Market Segmentation is the process where a company, that is offering a product or service, implements a structured approach to how it identifies market opportunity. Many companies might have a product or service that they struggle to align with a compelling need in the market – i.e they have a product or solution looking for a market. Others might have a product or service that could address many different market challenges across lots of different segments i.e. they are suffering from what I call a paradox of choice. Market Prioritisation is so important in this context.
Why should your company consider market segmentation?
Taking time as a company to outline market opportunity and to assess this market opportunity based on market insights and research, gives your business the best chance of forecasting and driving revenue growth.
In my experience, lots of companies avoid this activity because it does require some effort, focus and experience to do it right. It is crucial to choose the right criteria to support segmentation, to implement market research to generate insights for decision making and to get buy-in from the full leadership team for the prioritisation exercise.
Market Segmentation – The Approach
This is broadly the approach that I have taken with many of the clients I have engaged with to support them throughout the whole process:
Step 1
- Introduction to the process of Market Segmentation
- Assessment of current customer profile (ideal, acceptable, qualify out)
- Moderated session with leadership team to capture 1st draft of future market opportunities at a high level – structure agreed
Step 2
- Agreeing with the team the criteria for market assessment
- Communication on next steps for completing market research
Step 3
- Review of completed market assessment data
- Agreeing voting criteria with the team
- Team voting exercise (independent voting)
Step 4
- Execution of independent team voting, collation of results and moderation of feedback
- Heatmap generation and feedback to the team
- Sharing of top <x> market segments and review of company OKRs
The Market Segmentation and Market Prioritisation exercise can be done over a series of mentoring sessions where I can share best practice, tools to support the exercise and I can moderate the voting, collation of votes and feedback sessions.
This is a great exercise for the Product Manager or Strategic Marketer to initiate and is a super way of getting alignment on market opportunity across the leadership team.
“We completed an SMR with Siobhan, who led us through the process of analyzing each of the market segments for our products, identifying those segments where success was most likely and worthwhile. Siobhan made us question previously made assumptions about the markets we serve, making us think strategically about our business which lead to the generation of our 5 year transformation plan. I would highly recommend Siobhan.”
Joe Lynch, Head of Marketing & Sales, IMEC Technologies
Get in touch for more details. I can prepare a proposal that is tailored to your company’s specific needs.