The Art of Segmentation for BPO Services

Segmentation, to my mind is a Key Success Factor to Marketing Effectiveness in B2B Marketing. Let me now move to the work I have done in marketing BPO services to the English speaking countries from India.

The market perspective:

Typically large and medium organization in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada buys Offshore BPO Services. On scrutiny, we noticed differences in the buying cycle, buying process, velocity of decision making and selection criteria among the companies that formed the prospect base.

The Service Provider perspective:

In order to meet our goals across revenue, profitability and time to revenue, we needed to focus on scale, offering mix and propensity to offshore respectively.

Based on the above two perspectives, we segmented the 600 account prospect base that we had across the four segments mentioned below:

(a) First Time Offshorer. This category of prospect is bringing work offshore for the first time. Typically followers (behind the early movers) they want to leverage the learned service provider who is already serving the early mover. They wanted to cut short the time to benefit from offshoring.

(b) Looking for a Second Partner. These prospects have a sizeable offshore presence through an existing partner. While keeping the existing relationship stable they want to build new relationships for business continuity planning reasons. Since their driver is to reduce operational risk, they are looking to work with mature providers.

(c) First time outsourcers. This category of prospect has missed out on leveraging the wave of onshore outsourcing earlier. Perhaps their business was doing extremely well or they had business compulsions. Typically, they take a longer time to decide.

(d) Looking for the nth offshore provider. Typically a prospect, who has been Offshore for more than 4 years, has a few partners and now is looking to shut down a partner and hire a new one. This is typically a price driven segment.

After segmenting the 600 accounts across these four categories, we decided to focus on the (a), (b) and (c) categories. We decided to ignore the (d) category. The Strategy is successfully running in a couple of companies I have worked with. Their shareholders are smiling.

Cheers

Paul Simon Arakkal