How our Sales and Marketing teams experienced the need for segmentation through a game
The clueless sales and marketing teams of Qollabi were put together in a meeting room on a moody Monday morning in October. They were greeted by the excited CEO of the company, Friedrich Pétré, who started handing out cards to the team members with the air of an evil mastermind. Little did the sales and marketing teams know that this simple game of cards would show them the importance of segmentation.
Tough sales
Every card represented a role to play. The marketing team turned into shop owners, the leader of the sales team became an Account Manager, and the sales guys…they were playing sales guys still, only this time they were trying to sell a brand of shoes instead of a BRM software. The fictitious Account Manager and sales guys didn’t know however that the shop owners were looking for shoes but with certain limits or implications.
First, there was a limit on time. The sales guys only had a few minutes to impress the shop owners and the shop owners were told to wait a few minutes before complying with the sales guys. Another limit was the number of shoes every shop owner could buy, depending on their turnover. Then there were profile criteria, for instance, one of the shop owners was only looking for women’s shoes.
Results
The sales guys failed miserably in their cause but only because of one thing: they didn’t know what the needs of their clients were. If they had set up segmentation, they would have known where to go and what resources (time, people, budget) to allocate. With this short and funny exercise, both of the teams experienced the need for a segmentation plan firsthand.
