Discover the Secret of Customer Segmentation: The Make-or-Break Strategy for Your Success!

This article first appeared Pharma industry's digital magazine edition and is part 1 of 2.

#customersegmentation #customerexperience #neuroscience #neuromarketing #pharma #pharmamarketing #pharmasales

We know that reaching the right individual with the right message, in the right format, at the right time is crucial for the success and use of our medicines.

That claim is a fact - of course combined with solid and favorable results in phase 3 and phase 4 studies.

But where the latter is a given, otherwise we would not have a product on the market, the first continues to be a significant problem.

In this and a follow-up article, Fredrik Holmboe, speaker and digital strategist in the pharmaceutical and life science industries, will explore the different types of customer segments used by pharmaceutical companies, the challenges and opportunities associated with properly executed customer segmentation, and the importance of a clear focal point to tear down the silo structures we all know are there and increase collaboration between the departments sales,?marketing and medicine.

A nuanced analysis of differences between sales and marketing communication

There is a difference between sales communication and marketing communication, where sales communication focuses on communication that takes place in the room and communication that takes place digitally, while marketing communication focuses on reaching out to the market, either analog or digital. It may seem similar, after all, "it is the same customers that are the target of our commercial communication".

Right?

But it's a huge difference, and there's a lot of research to back up that claim.

Sales communication and engagement from a neuroscientific perspective

With a training in cognitive neuroscience, this particular area is incredibly interesting to me, and we start by focusing on sales communication, the salesperson's conditions and the recipient's brain.

First let’s clarify one important fact:

Using a sales campaign created for personal meetings in a digital context does not work, because the conditions are completely different. They are completely different because they are completely different for the recipient's brain!

The personal meeting

In the personal face-to-face meeting all the signals that we have developed to interpret through evolution is present:

• Body language: posture, gestures, movements.
• Facial mimicry: different facial expressions that show emotions and reactions.
• Pitches: pitch, volume, and tempo.
• Paralinguistics: Sounds and pauses that are not words, such as a silence that says more than a thousand words, sighs, groans, or laughter.
• The gaze: ?Eye contact and where you focus your gaze.

When we look at the list above, most aspects seem to be possible to achieve even in a virtual meeting.

But then we come to Albert Mehrabians, psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, well-known, but in most cases somewhat over-generalized, study, in which he claims that body language accounts for about 55 percent of our communication when it comes to emotions and attitudes. The tone of voice makes up about 38 percent, while the words we use only account for about 7 percent.

The study is considered somewhat overgeneralized because it was really about how people interpret conflicting information when communicating feelings and attitudes, and not communication in general.

However, given that Mehrabian's study is often cited, and often used in communication trainings, along with the three previously mentioned studies, we can draw a simple conclusion:

Using a sales campaign created for personal meetings in a digital context does not work, because the conditions are completely different. They are completely different because they are completely different for the recipient's brain!

There came that argument once again, simply because, unfortunately, I must say, I constantly see how a sales campaign for physical meetings is shortened slightly and then used in the digital meeting.

And it is a wrong approach if the goal is to create change and move a customer along an "adaptation ladder".

Completely wrong!

Why do I bring up this topic in an article whose focus should be on customer segmentation?

Well, there is a very clear reason and I will come to that a little later. But first, another dimension to the dilemma of segmentation!

"The commercial heritage"

First, we need to clarify another hypothesis that I see has great bearing on the subject. And it's a legacy all commercial organizations live with today.

It is the legacy that has its origins in the fact that the sales force was once the company's spearhead to the market.

And as a result, today a large part, if not all, of internal structures and processes designed to identify the market's best customers and greatest potential are based on the needs of the sales organization.

Today, the above approach is no longer enough!

What is needed is a more nuanced approach to reaching the market!

And now back to the example above where a sales situation was illustrated based on the salesperson being in the room with the customer or meeting the customer virtually. Same salesperson, two different scenarios.

And, as previously stated, almost always completely unnuanced between the physical and digital.

The same introduction, the same pictures, the same endings are used virtually as physically in almost all organizations which, at the risk of sounding like a parrot, is not good enough!

Why?

The virtual meeting, neuroscience and engagement

To answer that, let's take a short detour to Boston 2018, when I had the privilege of listening to Carmen Simon, a world-renowned expert and researcher in cognitive neuroscience when I was at the Inbound conference organized every year by Hubspot.

Carmen Simon, expert and researcher in cognitive neuroscience.

Carmen Simon has in her research delved into how our brain creates memories linked to engagement and decision-making and her presentation, perhaps not surprisingly, really stuck in my memory! It was amazing with everything that happened in her presentation with animations and sometimes just something as simple as a subtle "wave of hue" that swept diagonally behind all the text. Just to keep our brains engaged.

In her groundbreaking and highly readable book released in 2016, "Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions", she presents a fascinating "formula" for creating memorable content.

Carmen Simon's model for creating memorable content is based on the idea that effective communication should engage the audience, hereinafter "the customer", and help them remember the information to eventually make decisions based on the information. Here's a brief overview:

1. Attention: Capture customer attention by presenting relevant and engaging content. Use visual elements and storytelling to make information more attractive and relatable.
2. Encoding: Make information easy to process by breaking it down into smaller, digestible chunks. Use simple language, metaphors and similes to help the customer understand complex concepts, no one is fully learned.
3. The author's addition to Carmen's model: in connection with "coding" and "storage" occurs something called cognitive consolidation, which is the process by which the brain converts and stores information from short-term memory to long-term memory. This term is used in neuroscience and psychology to describe how our brain processes and stores memories in a more lasting way. Cognitive consolidation is an important part of the learning process and helps us retain information over time.
4. Storage: Help the customer retain the information by presenting it in a memorable way. Use repetition, elements that evoke emotions and news to make the content more memorable. Here it is simply a matter of creating connections in the audience's brain that make it easier for them to recall the information later.
5. Recall: In this step, we are no longer with the customer and must therefore have created "triggers" that help the customer remember the information through things they encounter in their everyday lives. We must therefore have linked our presentation to situations, patient meetings or similar that help the customer's brain to make the connection between the current event and our presentation.
6. Decision-making: It is now a good preparatory work before a presentation really gives results! Here we must rely on the fact that the previous steps have laid the foundations for a decision in our favour. If the customer has understood the message, felt commitment and consolidated the memory, it is more likely that they themselves will make decisions that are in line with what we have communicated. Here it is important that we have conveyed clear and relevant courses of action that the customer can use to make informed decisions.

By following this model, commercial organizations can create content that not only gives sellers the support they need in terms of sales materials for virtual meetings, but also captures customers' attention to ultimately influence their decision-making processes.

But what is it that makes a sales campaign seem to work in the physical meeting, you ask now, right?

Well, the answer to that is that in the physical meeting there is a skilled salesperson who can adapt his message, his body language, his energy level, his ability to capture the audience's attention and everything else that makes a skilled salesperson a skilled salesperson. With a skilled salesperson in the room, it can be a "show", something that in itself is memorable. That salesperson's skill in the room, falls flat in a virtual meeting. Then the seller needs support from the sales campaign.

Sales campaign

I hope that it is now clear that what is needed is a sales campaign that is built from the ground up to suit the digital meeting, which in short means more storytelling, more video, more animations and structure that leads the customer's eyes right, and above all fewer static presentation slides with black and white scientific curves.

That type of static slide with a lot of information is called?"Death by powerpoint" in some circles, which also happens to be an interesting TED talk I can recommend.

Back to sales campaigns and the salesperson's meeting with the customer, because this is where I come to what I promised earlier, which is to explain why I spend such a large part of an article on segmentation highlighting the difference between a salesperson's physical and virtual meeting with the customer.

The reason is that in order to succeed in our goal of moving a customer along an adaptation ladder, to help that doctor give our drug to the right patient at the right time and ultimately create the foundation for a better care situation, then we have to be relevant.

We must be relevant.

And what does it mean to be relevant?

Simple, you just have to say the right thing at the right time. Then you are relevant. Or?

Not if we approach the concept of "relevance" from a first-principle thinking, which means breaking down problems or concepts into their basic elements and building an understanding based on those elements.

When it comes to being relevant to an audience or customer, we can use first-principle thinking to identify the fundamental factors that create relevance.

1. Understand your audience: Start by deeply understanding your listener's or customer's needs, values, and expectations. This means doing research, asking questions, and gathering insights about what's important to them.
2. Personalize your message: Use audience insights to create a message that's tailored to their interests and needs. This may involve adjusting the tone, content, or presentation of your message to make it more relevant and engaging.
3. Create value: Offer solutions, insights, or information that are valuable to your audience. Make sure what you offer is useful, practical and relevant to their situation and needs.
4. Build relationships: Create a sense of trust and genuineness by building long-term relationships with your target audience. This can mean being transparent, honest and consistent in your communication as well as showing empathy and understanding of their perspective.
5. Capture attention: Use techniques to capture the audience's or customer's attention and engagement, such as storytelling, humor, or emotional triggers.

The above five points came directly from ChatGPT4 (which in so many cases is far much better than Google) for one simple reason and that is to see if what I have lectured about and claimed for many years has been correct. Happily, I can say that I and ChatGPT4 are in agreement.

Compare the list that comes from Carmen Simon's research with the list of the fundamental building blocks for the concept of relevance to an audience and you will see a lot of similarities and when combining the two lists you can deduce even more insights.

But above all, it is possible to come to a fundamental conclusion, and this is where we come to segmentation of the customer group.

Finally you're thinking, is he going to write a whole j*kla book before he gets to the point?

If you know me, you know that I like to put things in context before I get to the point, so that the point lands in a clear context.

This topic is so important that it requires proper context.

Why properly executed customer segmentation is what makes you win or disappear

Let's start with what it usually looks like today. Often the customer group is divided into five different segments that are usually described relatively briefly. In short, in the way that an entire customer segment, such as "Cautiously progressive", is described with 6-7 sentences, and that these sentences should then form the basis for the marketing department's work.

But we have longer descriptions, you say now, and yes, you probably have, but these are usually developed at a global or European level and then developed with the "most important" markets in focus, that is, the EU5 markets.

I know because I've been involved in creating those kinds of global segment descriptions, which, even though we created pretty good Personas, which are better than segment descriptions, still didn't fit very many markets. That was the reason why in the project where I led the content strategy, we had Brazil and Australia as pilot markets.

With just over four years as a product manager, I also know how such work lands up in the "cold Nordic region".

With these findings about customer segmentation and how it usually looks, I come to the article's most important points:

It is not enough to build the organization's entire commercial communication on the legacy of competitiveness that lives on, that is, from the time when the sales department was the company's spearhead to the market, when the marketing department's contribution to the company's competitiveness has become so much more important.

Since the above paragraph is the foundation of this entire article, please stop here and think about what it means based on what you read earlier in this article. Stop and think about what that means. Actually.

You can read the continuation of this article in Pharma Industry 3/2023. If you have any questions until then, or discuss this topic at your upcoming summer conference, I can easily be reached on LinkedIn. For next time, I wish you all the best!

If you have any thoughts or questions, please leave a comment below or contact me via PM here on LinkedIn. My profile is open, so even though we are not first-hand contacts, it doesn't cost you anything InMail to contact me.

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Fredrik Holmboe?is the Owner & Lead digital strategist at Dualia, an agency focused on the pharma and life science industries. He writes, speaks, and runs workshops - all with the goal of improving commercial communication in these industries. He?has an educational background in neuroscience and philosophy, sprinkled with quantum physics and computational neuroscience; today called artificial intelligence. The goal was first to go into research in neuroplasticity, but having worked in sales since the age of 17, the natural continuation was the pharmaceutical industry. Fredrik has worked for companies such as Janssen, Biogen, Novartis, and Bayer.