One size does not fit all: The power of customer segmentation

Igor Uman
Associate Principal, Sg2 Life Sciences and Industry Consulting

Karl Karlsson
Vice President, Sg2 Life Sciences and Industry

In today's highly competitive healthcare landscape, companies that embrace tailored segmentation approaches have witnessed significant gains in sales efficiency and profitability — in fact, the importance of adopting a segmented approach, and how that helps businesses optimize their go-to-market strategies, cannot be overstated.

Essentially, you cannot show up to a health system conversation without doing your due diligence — speaking to specific customer needs is the only way to ensure an effective approach that will result in helping providers meet their mission of bettering patient outcomes.

If you're not already engaged in customer segmentation, it's time to get started.

How does effective segmentation work?

Effective segmentation begins with understanding the unique characteristics and needs of your target audience. Generic assumptions can often lead to missed opportunities and ineffective sales efforts. By investing time and resources into market research and analysis, suppliers can gain valuable insights into customer preferences, behaviors and pain points. This knowledge forms the foundation for developing a segmented approach that resonates with different customers.

Let's explore a real-life case study to illustrate the benefits of tailored segmentation. A life sciences organization in the cancer space faced challenges due to limited sales force capacity, lack of market segmentation and absence of a formalized go-to-market strategy. Collaborating with our experts, they embarked on a journey to segment and rank health systems and providers based on relevant procedure and disease volume, market share, forecasted market growth, and care model maturity.

What questions were asked to accomplish this?

• Which customers have the greatest clinical need for my products and services? Here we would look at attributes such as disease or procedure prevalence within a health system's patient population; health system quality performance and associated financial penalties; and prevalence of disease risk factors in patient population
• Which customers have the greatest ability to use/deploy my products and services? Look at attributes like system of care infrastructure, IT infrastructure, financial health and "care model maturity" generally.
• Which customers present the greatest business opportunity? Consider attributes like health system total volume of relevant procedures and diagnoses; health system market share; and forecasted procedure or disease growth in health system markets.
• With which customers do we have greatest access? Think about current sales; existing strategic partnerships; and existing sales channels like distributor and GPO relationships.

What else should be considered?

One critical aspect often overlooked in segmentation is the importance of understanding the customer's story. When approaching a potential customer, it is essential to research and comprehend their unique challenges, goals and industry landscape. By aligning your value proposition with their specific needs and pain points, you demonstrate a genuine understanding of their situation.

For instance, consider ASCs versus hospital outpatient departments. They're going to have different challenges, payment methods and procedures. An overly broad segmentation that doesn't capture those nuances will simply not work. It's imperative for businesses to determine what strategic, clinical, operational, financial, and even innovation priorities and challenges their products can help a specific customer solve for.

And the benefits of tailored segmentation extend beyond optimizing sales efforts. By delivering personalized value propositions, businesses can establish themselves as trusted partners who genuinely care about their customers' success. This customer-centric approach builds long-lasting relationships and opens doors for future collaboration, referrals and positive word-of-mouth.

Additionally, to achieve successful segmentation, you'll want to leverage data and analytics. By harnessing the power of customer data, market data and your own sales data and field intel, you can identify patterns, trends and preferences that enable the creation of highly targeted marketing campaigns. Leveraging technology and automation tools can further enhance the efficiency and accuracy of segmentation efforts — for example, they can help you identify the top 100 customers to focus on and reveal insights around those customers' unique attributes and behaviors.

Embrace the transformative impact of segmentation.

Adopting a tailored segmentation approach is no longer a luxury but a necessity in today's dynamic marketplace. By investing in understanding your customers, prioritizing efforts and personalizing value propositions, suppliers can unlock significant growth opportunities and maximize their sales potential.

Authors

As a member of the Sg2 consulting team, Igor Uman works with life sciences organizations to develop market access and commercial strategies. His engagement experience focuses on market research and analytics, customer and market segmentation, and value proposition refinement. He received an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a dual B.A. in economics and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As the lead on the Sg2 life sciences and industry team, Karl Karlsson leverages nearly 20 years of life sciences experience to develop strategies and solutions for biopharma, medical device, distributors, health IT and finance services. On a day-to-day basis, he helps position Sg2 as a strategic advisor in partnerships between leading health systems and life sciences firms. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, where he developed models using stem cell technologies to study HIV drug targets, and a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and pharmacology from King's College London.