Client Segmentation and Strategic Planning Workshop

This is an exercise you and your team will want to conduct as a charged for service with clients, so it makes sense to start by working through the process for your own practice. The objective of the exercise is to establish a realistic Business Development plan that you and your team, (or your clients and their teams), can confidently work to deliver.

Using the Client Segmentation Model, the exercise starts with a clear understanding of exactly what your clients purchased, broken down by product / service category in the last 12 months. If yours (or your client’s) records do not provide the granularity of reporting needed, the Client Segmentation Model is designed to allow you and your team to quickly enter best estimates to provide a robust start point.

The model is designed to help you project realistic targets for client penetration for your existing products / services growth quickly and easily, and to then augment this by projecting the sales and client take up for new products and services planning up to 5 years into the future.

Having projected the expected sales mix and the related gross revenue you can quickly enter the cost of sales, hourly rate, hours, and any additional overheads required to deliver the services. To facilitate this, you will logically use a combination of the Business Overview, Performance Analysis, Performance Trend and other reports to accurately calculate your cost of sales estimates for your, (or your client’s) existing products and services.

If projecting sales penetration for new products and services, you would then enter your best estimate of the cost of sales and other directly related overheads to establish your gross margin estimates, to complete the projection you will project your estimated number of clients over the next five years.

Having established the ‘Output’ in terms of sales and related costs / profits, the Client Segmentation Model walks you (or your clients), through a process which effectively identifies the ‘Inputs’ required to make the plan happen by estimating the number of client meetings/discussions necessary to achieve success in terms of numbers of units sold.

By breaking down the ‘Input’ activity, (meetings/discussions), with clients into months and named individuals, the end point is an agreed activity plan by person with a clear time frame with which to then track and report on progress against plan as the business growth activities unfold month by month.

As you will appreciate this is a tremendous management tool for both your own practice and for your clients to work collaboratively to establish a plan everyone ‘buys into’ and hence generates more commitment to implement the plan. The Client Segmentation Model and the Strategic Planning Workshop are also a logical part of a more robust and more detailed forecasting process.

Ideally this exercise will become part of yours and your clients annual planning process as part of the process of reviewing last year’s performance and more important, planning and establishing commitment to deliver in the next 12 months.

For a more detailed description of the Client Segmentation Model and its use – click here.