Improve Sales Conversations by Segmenting Customers
Understanding who your best customers are starts with segmentation. Also known as grouping similar customers by type and rankings. Segmenting customers provides context for your choices during your interactions with them.
The Importance of Segmenting Customers
While it seems obvious that you should treat every customer with individual, tailored interactions, it’s easy to let that slip when you’re dealing with thousands of customers with dozens of different employees. Left with your own devices, you tend to homogenize your customer base.
The danger in that is that your customers are not the same. Not only are they inherently different, occupying different spots in the marketplace, having different verticals, or selling different products, but they have not interacted with your company the same. Some have bought more, some have been less profitable, and some have been far easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Recognizing differences between your customers and intelligently ranking them as A, B, C, or D customers allows you to make smarter choices while wasting less time.
Why is Segmentation Difficult?
Not many people segment their customers, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a complex issue. For example, if you’re going to rank your customers, you need to look at things like profitability, sales, returns, margins, and much more. That information is likely captured in your ERP, but it’s buried there. No prebuilt, configured reports to pull actionable insights quickly or easily.
Once you have the data for each customer, the question arises of how you will weigh the importance of customer profitability vs. their margin vs. your total sales vs. the cost to deliver. And after you decide what’s most important, how do you ensure the process is consistent between all customers now and far into the future?
Take Control of Your Segmentation
White Cup uses customer rankings in two areas:
- Pricing
- Similar customers buying similar products should be paying similar prices. Simple and straightforward.
- Improving the quality of sales calls
- Knowing how your customers are ranked gives you a pretty good idea of why they’re ranked that way. And that fosters great sales calls about what it would take to move them forward with your business. As time is a finite resource, you want to spend it with your A customers and your customers that have an opportunity to move up in ranking—from a C to a B and from a B to an A. Ultimately, that’s where you’ll make the most impact on your bottom line.
So, now what? Well, the conversations you should have with your customers will be dictated by the data found in your Pricing software.
See it in Action: Do You Really Know Who Your Best Customers Are?
To see segmentation in action and the steps you should take once you’ve ranked your customers, check out this 12-minute webinar recording by Vice President of Business Development Brian Friedle. Learn how to really know who your best customers are. In it, he walks through the importance of segmenting customers, how to make it easy, and then what is possible once you’ve done it. He shows step by step how to unlock the power of the data you already have using White Cup Pricing.
About White Cup
White Cup turns a distributor’s sales pains into profit gains. Our CRM, Business Intelligence (BI), and Pricing software make it easier for you to sell more, keep more profit, and beat the competition. With over 20 years of experience, White Cup is trusted by more than 1,000 customers globally.
