In B2B, companies do not buy. People do.
How do you segment your customers? Almost every company has an answer ready. Customer bases are sliced by revenue, by company size, by industry, by region, by potential, by new versus existing. B2B companies put a particularly great deal of energy into these models, and they earn their keep. A large international group needs different handling from a mid-sized firm, and a key account justifies a different level of resource from an occasional buyer.
The trouble starts when we segment accounts and stop seeing customers within these accounts as individuals.
A few years ago we worked on customer journeys with one of the largest MedTech companies in the world. We asked how they segmented their customers, in particular the doctors they worked with. The answer was, roughly: โWe have large hospitals, small hospitals, and doctorsโ practices.โ
That was the entire segmentation.
For sales planning and resource allocation, that might have been perfectly adequate. For the question of how to talk to Doctor Mรผller on Tuesday morning, it was close to useless. We still did not know what drove him. Did he want the best possible outcome for his patients? Was he excited by new technology? Was he trying to make his department more efficient, advance his career, cut costs, or simply avoid being the person who introduced a new system that failed?
The hospital bought the device. But people made the decision.
This matters more in B2B than anywhere else. Consumer businesses can watch behaviour across enormous volumes of data: what people click, what they buy, which message moves them. B2B reality is usually the opposite. Few customers, high order values, long relationships, and several people involved in every decision. Procurement wants something different from the technical lead, and the managing director wants something different from the person who will actually use the thing. Worse still, two people with identical job titles can behave nothing alike. One wants to decide today. The other wants to understand every detail first.
Your segmentation is probably not wrong. It is just answering a different question from the one your salespeople face every morning.
๐๐จ๐๐ฌ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐ฌ๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐ญ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ ๐๐ง๐ฒ๐จ๐ง๐ ๐ข๐ง ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ๐ซ ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ฉ๐๐ง๐ฒ ๐ก๐จ๐ฐ ๐ญ๐จ ๐๐๐ก๐๐ฏ๐ ๐๐ข๐๐๐๐ซ๐๐ง๐ญ๐ฅ๐ฒ ๐ญ๐จ๐ฆ๐จ๐ซ๐ซ๐จ๐ฐ?
