Anthony W. Ulwick

How did the Outcome-Based Segmentation solution impact your market strategy?

Outcome-Based Segmentation gave us a more realistic way to look at the market. Over time we had confused sales prioritization with real customer market segmentation. At the end of the day, we only have a certain number of salespeople, so we tend to want to call on the larger dairies, because if you get one of them, they have a measurable impact on your business. We just assumed that all those large dairies share certain needs, and that small dairies have completely different needs. The data showed that was not the case, so that absolutely was surprising.

What other market strategy recommendations provided your team with immediate value?

One of the key recommendations that we initially focused on was to go after the low-hanging fruit, to find out if and where our existing products addressed some of the most underserved outcomes that were identified. We basically got into a room, listed 165 of the outcomes on the wall, color coded the segmentation, and identified the 10 or 11 outcomes that all segments shared and identified as high priorities. We literally went through each one of our products and tried to see which outcomes those products could potentially help address.

We then focused a lot on the redesign of our whole messaging. We took all our product literature and our website and redesigned and focused them on outcomes. Our whole marketing talk and speak turned to outcome based,

and that is very prevalent now in our whole business. People talk about outcomes. Now you hear salespeople saying, “We need to position this in terms of an outcome a person is trying to satisfy.” So that is rewarding, to hear people starting to think that way. I think some of the basic elements of the recommendations we followed pretty quickly.

There were several recommendations made around becoming a total solution provider to the dairy. We probably have been a little slower to respond on that, but it’s not ignored; it’s probably something I am spending more time on now, thinking about.