If you’re looking to grow your advisory practice, shift your focus to your segmentation strategy.
Thousands of prospects exist. You only have the time and resources to connect with a few.
If you’ve already taken the time to properly set up a segmentation strategy , you’ve done the hard work! Now it’s time to make sure you’re utilizing the data you’re gleaning to foster sustainable growth and expansion for your firm.
How Segmentation Contributes to the Right Kind of Sustainable Growth
Ideally, your firm needs to understand every potential prospect on an individual level. As you gain clients, develop a larger pool of prospects, and expand your team, understanding prospect data on an individual level is difficult. Without a well-defined and well-implemented segmentation strategy, your firm is at risk for unsustainable growth or even growth that isn’t profitable long-term.
Segmentation is the answer, offering the necessary insights to discover how and where to spend your valuable prospecting time producing sustainable results. It is a key factor in effectively scaling your business. A critical element of winning market share, retaining top clients, and driving continuous growth for your firm.
Key to Growth: Continual Analysis
Your segmentation strategy can deliver specific outputs based on the variables used as segment parameters. Analyzing the outputs and making critical business decisions based on the intel you’re receiving is how you cultivate a solid growth strategy.
Since growth is the goal, set a time once a month to regularly monitor your segment’s conversion rates. If there is a top-performing segment, look for common variables or what part of their journey you’d consider as “the turning point,” and look to apply any learnings to lower converting groups.
Consider diving deeper into individual segments to gain actionable intel. Ask questions like these:
- Which access points do prospects within a certain segment gravitate towards?
- Which marketing channel tends to perform best within a segment?
- Is there a pattern to how prospects drop off?
- Which prospect segments require more resources, and why?
- Do the highest converting segments align with the firm’s overall goals? Why or why not?
- Should your firm consider creating additional opportunities for a surprising top-performing yet underserved segment?
As the firm’s leader, you must also be open to adapting your methods based on what the data is communicating. Ask questions that require hard data to answer.
Key to Growth: Use Marketing Resources Wisely
Part of segmentation is carefully analyzing where and how your marketing dollars are utilized. Each of your prospect segments will require a different pre-sales approach, and your marketing should align accordingly.
When evaluating marketing opportunities, ask yourself these questions: Is this right for my business? Is this right for my audience? Is this where my ideal prospects are?
Choose two or three areas where you can devote time and resources. For example, writing or sourcing content, building a Facebook following and sending high-quality emails. By focusing on just a few, your marketing can become easily measured and sustainable.
Be sure to analyze both your strategic messaging and the various channels. For example, if you’re targeting physicians as well as executives, do not assume their needs are the same. Create a better experience for these individuals, both as a prospect and as a client, by delivering messages on the right platforms that are tailored to their unique needs.
One firm puts it this way: Customers now expect a personalized experience [like Amazon] that takes previous interactions and input they have provided to you or your practice into account. If you overlook it, it could damage the relationship and open you up to competition that will deliver what you can’t.
Key to Growth: Unify Efforts
As businesses scale for growth, one person is unable to manage brand continuity. The task becomes too large for one individual to train everyone, communicate the values, document processes, and ensure a cohesive prospect journey. To drive growth through segmentation, your processes must be documented, repeatable, and unified.
Prepare with the future in mind to easily and efficiently replicate success as you gain partners or support staff. In addition to creating detailed prospect personas to correlate with your segments, you should also document the following:
- Sales Process. This could be a simple flow chart or a listing of the steps in your prospect’s journey to becoming a client.
- Lead Nurturing Process. Document how your prospects interact with your brand for each persona. This should include what materials (emails? Downloads? ebooks?) and channels your prospect would ideally engage with along their journey.
- Sales Script. Formalize your prospect conversations, even if it’s a rough outline of how you run introductory calls.
- Value Proposition and Core Values. No one can explain your business like you can. Write out your value proposition and the elements that differentiate you from your competitors.
It takes time upfront, but the payoff is worth it. Create documentation for each prospect segment and profile, offering details on key data points you’ve uncovered throughout your segmentation strategy.