Salaried employees or business owners: choosing the customer segment you can serve well

Choose the group whose questions you can answer without looking anything up, whose paperwork you can finish in one sitting, and whom you can reach through a channel you already use. Salaried people ask about safety, tax and the next goal, and you find them through workplaces and families. Business owners ask about cash flow, timing and risk, and you find them through trade circles and accountants. Serve one group well for a year. A message that speaks to both persuades neither.

How do the two groups differ in practice?

Neither column is better. They ask for different habits from you.

What does each need in the first meeting?

The salaried client needs clarity and something to repeat to the family. Say in plain words what to do and why, and hand over a one-page summary. For many, time is not the problem. Confidence is. Cut the decision to three lines and you earn the second meeting.

The business owner needs a fast first answer and a careful second one. Owners want to know in a sentence or two whether you can help. Many have no time for a presentation. But a proposal is likely to be checked with the accountant, so your papers must stand up to a second reader. An owner who gets a vague answer may stop replying without saying so.

How do you decide? Four checks, in this order

Stop at the first check that gives a clear answer.

1. Who do you already serve well? Look at your last twenty clients. If most of the good ones, the ones who answered quickly and referred others, belong to one group, that is your answer.
2. Where can you find twenty this month? Name the place: an employer's campus, a trade market, an association. If you can name one for a group and not for the other, take that group.
3. Whose papers can you handle? Business files take longer and need someone who can read a balance sheet. If nobody in your office can, do not start there.
4. Whose follow-up can you keep up? Salaried clients reward steady, light contact. Owners reward being on hand at the right moment. Pick the pattern that matches your habits.

If the four point in different directions, go with check two. A segment you can reach is worth more than a better one you cannot.

What did a Bhilai adviser change?

Here is an invented case. An adviser in Bhilai starts by offering everything to everyone: home loans, term cover, mutual funds, business loans. The homepage says "financial solutions for you and your business". Enquiries come but scatter. A steel-plant supervisor asks about term cover, a fabrication-shop owner asks for working capital, and one message fits neither.

Listing the best twenty clients, the adviser finds fourteen are small fabricators and suppliers to the plant, introduced by two accountants. The salaried clients are pleasant but silent between renewals. The adviser chooses business owners first, rewrites the message around cash cycles and insurance for the unit, and starts meeting the two accountants to hear what their clients are stuck on.

The first slip: the salaried-client message stays on the homepage out of habit. The accountants cannot tell what the adviser does, and some referrals are the wrong kind. The salaried message moves lower down. Referrals improve, but about half a year of salaried renewals slowly thins out, and that is the cost of the choice.

This works when you have a channel into the group. It fails when you pick a segment for its size and know nobody in it.

What if neither group fits?

Then your segment is something else, and that is fine. Retired people, doctors, women running home businesses, farmers with allied trades, private-school teachers: each has its own questions and places to be found. The method is the same. Name who you serve well, where you find twenty, and what you can handle.

Do not build a segment on the products you want to sell. A segment is a group of people with a place and a question. A product list is neither.

How do you reach twenty of them in practice?

For salaried clients, ask one employee at a company where you already have a client whether an informal evening session on tax and savings would be welcome. The employee, not you, invites colleagues. For business owners, ask an accountant you trust which of their clients are stuck on a loan or on cover, and offer a short conversation to those clients, with the accountant's knowledge.

In both cases the introduction comes from a person who already trusts you. Cold messages to a bought list are a poor way in for either group, and they raise questions about consent and data that your own adviser should answer.

How do you test the choice?

Run it for a stretch you set in advance and count three things only: enquiries from the segment, conversations that reached a second meeting, and clients who gave a referral. A low first count means the channel is wrong. A low second means the message is wrong. A low third means service after the sale is wrong. Fix the low one before you widen the segment.

List your twenty and decide

Write your twenty best clients in one column. Beside each, put the group they belong to and the person who introduced them. Then read how to get loan leads or how to get more insurance clients for the channels of the group you chose. Customer segmentation is the wider method, and the wider picture for your trade is on our financial services page. If you want a second opinion on the segment you pick, tell us what you need.