B2BMX2018

B2B IN THE AGE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE The Experiential Segmentation Workshop Preparing your B2B firm to compete in the experience economy 4 EXPERIENTIAL SEGMENTATION: YOU CAN DO THIS Mark Twain once quipped about the weather: "Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it." If you swapped out "customer experience" for weather, would that be a fair description of how most B2B firms roll? Sure, there are flashes of brilliance here and there. And frequently there are individual acts of heroism. But in the end, what does it all add up to? When it comes to experience and its connection to the meaning of a brand, there's a whole lot of signal cancellation going on. This is happening despite the fact that people generally understand how critical customer experience is to creating and keeping customers, building differentiated brands and sustaining business growth. So, what gives? When we get together with people who care about linking customer experience to brand and business performance, we tend to hear many of the same frustrations: process barriers, IT barriers, organizational design barriers, leadership support barriers and the prioritization of the wrong metrics and rewards. Sound familiar? You often get the impression from these conversations that people perceive the issues to be not just beyond their control, but beyond even their sphere of influence. And that's broadly accurate, yet there is one point of leverage that is routinely overlooked: Perspective. The way you see–and, specific to this context, the way you hold the customer in the mind's eye–can be contagious. In fact, it usually is. And sometimes it can be transformative. Because all of those aforementioned barriers actually originate not in the economy at large or the dynamics of your marketplace, but rather in the structure of your organization's own imagination. That's your leverage point. Experiential segmentation begins with the idea that the practice of segmentation is a kind of design. The segmentation models that exist widely in B2B were designed in a specific context, to enable a specific way of doing business. The context has changed. Old ways of doing business are under pressure. Today, customer experience really matters. The perspective-building journey that starts with this workshop can help you do something about it. Today, customer experience really matters. The perspective- building journey that starts with this workshop can help you do something about it. B2B IN THE AGE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE The Experiential Segmentation Workshop Preparing your B2B firm to compete in the experience economy 13 ADOPTION MANAGEMENT CHECKLIST Are you people-ready? Executive vision: executive leader committed to persistent support over adoption hump Evangelists: matrixed team of change leaders engaged through development and adoption stage Workshopping: work teams engaged with data views customized to their functional requirements Are you action-ready? Pilot applications are defined and funding is secured Plan to communicate and promote results is in place Are you data-ready? Ready to interface segmentation with MAP CRM and/or CDP Ready to interface segmentation with marketing content taxonomy and CMP/CMS process Then you're ready to make a shift from product-oriented segmentation to experience-oriented segmentation. Have you implemented the above? Then you're ready to begin on this last box: Zombie personas rounded up and destroyed 11194_Q_Workbook_printers.indd 8-9 2018-02-12 4:20 PM

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