Segmentation du marché interentreprises

Business-to-Business segmentation rarely receives the attention that its cousin discipline, customer segmentation, receives.  We at SIS International Market Research have compiled a few considerations for B2B segmentation.  This is not an exhaustive description, but an overview for understanding how business-to-business can help companies to grow their accounts and revenues.  SIS helps companies develop actionable segmentation plans that can boost profitability.

Les entreprises peuvent prendre en compte plusieurs variables différentes dans leurs segmentations.

• Comportement
• Rentabilité / Valeur client à vie
• Avantage/Attribut
• Analyse conjointe
• Utilisation ou application
• Classe de produit
• Exigences de prix/qualité
• Concurrent

In Low-involvement product offerings, companies can consider researching usage behavior, buyer behavior, price elasticity / sensitivity and brand loyalty, among others.  For high and medium involvement products, businesses can consider researching their customers’ comprehensive needs, buyer types, business’ buying behavior and core values, among many others.  Lifetime Customer Value as a metric can provide companies a measurement of the value of a client to the firm; with research into each segment done by Lifetime Customer Value and the Pareto principle (80 20 rule), companies can make a concerted effort to improve profitability.  The variables for segmentation will vary by company and industry.

Michael Baker auteur de «Commercialisation” asserts that Market Positioning should include quantitative analysis.  He advanced the following quantitative analysis:

Taille potentielle du marché x probabilité de pénétration

Customer share has received currency in the past two decades over market share as a useful metric.  Companies can estimate market potential with the following quantitative analysis:

Potentiel client sur le marché x part de client

Quelques considérations pour la recherche sur la segmentation Business-to-Business :

1. Avoid focusing too much on the product.  Rather, companies might consider a segmentation based on perceived benefits by each segment.  An example of this is with many software companies that focus only on functions, rather than the benefits that customers of many different sizes may perceive.
2. Avoid focusing on company size as a means to meet customer needs.  By putting companies in categories by how many employees they have, these segmentations can miss important insights and make smaller companies feel that their needs won’t be met.
3. Business-to-business segmentation needs to be useful to the company.  While companies can do vast amounts of research, the segmentation information needs to be relevant and actionable.
4. To create a clear market positioning that can be tested.  An example of a positioning statement is:
   Pour les responsables des systèmes d'information, Microsoft est la marque de progiciels qui offre le meilleur rapport qualité-prix en raison de fonctionnalités supplémentaires, de services et de prix compétitifs.
5. Engagement continu en faveur de la recherche alors que les besoins des clients évoluent rapidement

Pourquoi cibler les gros utilisateurs dans la segmentation du marché ?

1. Companies can often extract the most value from these customers because they’re willing to spend.  According to the Pareto Principle / 80 20 Rule, companies can benefit from targeting the 20% of customers that compose 80% of their revenues.
2. Une fidélité accrue réduit les coûts d’acquisition de clients sur le long terme
3. Marketing costs can become cheaper, as customers increase the frequency of purchase

Directives générales pour le marketing B2B :

• Débutants
  • Focus sur les avantages du produit
  • Apprenez mieux lorsque le message est bien organisé
  • Bénéficier de multiples expositions à l’information
• Experts
  • Concentrez-vous sur les attributs du produit
  • Apprenez facilement si le message est organisé ou non
  • Bénéficiez d’une exposition unique aux informations