A segment of one

The old cliche has it that the world can be divided into two types of people: those that divide the world into two types of people and those that do not.  Typically marketers fall into the former category and salespeople into the latter.  We pay marketers to make sense of the big wide world whereas salesmanship rewards an intense focus on the individual customer.

Much of the time I find that the segmentation strategies operate in much the same way as horoscopes: a point of post hoc analysis more interesting than useful from a sales perspective.

Segmentation strategies, predicated on the assumption that a market can be divided into discrete, identifiable, predictable (and thus exploitable) blocs, are like catnip to marketers.  There's nothing a product manager wants to cultivate more than an aura of prescience, omniscience if that can be managed.  There are plenty of strategic research consultancies who will happily take your money whilst promising you that aura.

Things are different in pharma.  Because the major comms channel available to marketers in most markets is the sales team, broad-brush segmentation models often clash with the salesperson's worldview wherein each prescribing doctor is unique.  Imposing a segmentation strategy on a sales team often adds an unneeded element of complexity into the mix and I'm often brought in to assist translating the marketing speak into sales action.  My question for marketers is this: -

A segmentation model implies that different customers will respond to different messages.  How many conversations do you want the sale rep to carry around in her head?

At the moment I'm involved in several such segmentation projects of varying degrees of sophistication.  The most unfortunate of these went live with the sales team recently.  A ham-fisted marketing presentation managed to be patronising of the sales team, which was in attendance, and contemptuous of the doctors, who were not.  It's generally a bad idea to portray a segment of your customer base as "just wanting a quiet life and more interested in his golf game than his patients".  It's an even worse idea to illustrate your point with cartoon imagery usually associated with Covent Garden street artists.

The sales team in question took it with a grain of salt, which is what experienced sales teams do when confronted with overwrought marketing efforts.  If each customer represents a segment of one then the return on effort for fashioning a plan for an individual is far higher than that for memorising 4-5 separate conversations that will apparently 'push the buttons' of the different types before deciding into which segment each customer belongs.

The unspoken challenge in all of this is that even if the strategy is correct and the market can be broken into four or five segments the salesperson still has to dumb down her knowledge of the customer so that he or she conforms to a certain segment.  If you can close your eyes and visualise an individual doctor then a cliched overview is going to be of partial value to you at best.