Help! My Segmentation is failing!

So you have a really strong segmentation, designed against clear business objectives…it’s all plain sailing from here, right?  

Sadly, that’s not always the case. 

We have invited our friend and colleague Helen Donald, Partner at STRAT7 Advisory, to share how we approach a key part of making a new segmentation framework a success: the deployment. 

How can I get the most value from my investment in a segmentation project? 

… that’s a question we often hear from our clients – before, during and after a project.

I think we all know what a huge difference a successful segmentation can make to your business, enabling you to engage with the right customers at a more meaningful level and deliver fresh value to both you and your target audiences.

But the hardest part of delivering a segmentation is often its deployment.  I’ve been in many a segmentation discussion – in cases where it has gone right but also wrong. And often it’s at the roll-out or deployment stage where it is make-or-break – where it can either become a headache or one of their most powerful tools.

For a segmentation to be successfully deployed you need to go beyond a jazzy launch and posters on walls. You need to really understand the people who will use your new framework and design a segmentation rollout specific to their behaviours and needs.

What are the most common pitfalls and how and can you avoid them?

A key challenge we have seen for many of our clients is that they invest in a new strategic framework but it isn’t adopted internally because stakeholders…

• Don’t understand it and it’s not top of mind

• Don’t see the value of adopting it

• Struggle to see how to easily integrate it into their day-to-day activities

Underlying these issues are often deeper ones about how the framework connects to the wider business. Maybe the segmentation framework doesn’t speak to their corporate strategy – meaning it is relegated to the ‘nice to know’ zone of customer insight. Maybe it too much of an effort for people to learn and understand alongside the pressures of business as usual. And maybe it feels unrelated to the work that they do or incompatible with existing systems and processes.

So how can you ensure things go to plan? 

To deliver transformational impact from a segmentation requires a change in behaviour.

It’s important to remember our colleagues are humans too and subject to the same biases and heuristics as everyone else. Hence why it was vital for us to develop an approach to deployment with behaviour change models in mind (COM-B and Kotter’s 8-step change model, if you’re curious).

At STRAT7 Advisory we have developed a deployment programme centred around three key pillars, inspired by behaviour change principles.

Your success is our success 

Introducing the new STRAT7 Advisory Segmentation Clinic

Our ambition is for all of our segmentations to be truly transformational, and this can only be the case if they are deployed successfully.

STRAT7 Advisory is now offering 45-minute sessions to check in your deployment progress, designed around our three pillars of segmentation deployment to identify the most significant pain points and the drivers behind these.

• Diagnosis to action plan in a week. Following each clinic, we will send you a summary of our discussion and recommendations for key action points in order of priority.
• Tailored to your objectives and sector. We tailor our discussion around your key goals and objectives, taking into account the framework design, the customer-centric maturity of your business and sector-specific challenges to adoption.

Our new clinics are just one way that we are committed to helping our clients get the most out of their segmentations and ensure they deliver the right return on investment.

If that sounds like something that would be useful to you, please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.