Strategic Market Segmentation

I am so sick of the term ROI, particularly when it comes to CX. It's limiting and so short-term. Let's talk about how CX can deliver business value instead (revenue, efficiency, culture). Here’s where/why ROI might not always be the best fit: 1. Long-Term Investments Some investments are just strategic and require a long-term perspective to realize their full benefit. For example, transforming organizational culture might involve upfront costs that don't yield immediate financial returns. Focusing solely on ROI could discourage investment in initiatives that are crucial for long-term sustainability and competitive advantage. 2. Innovation and Experimentation Innovation often requires experimenting with new ideas, technologies, or business models, where the outcomes are uncertain. A strict adherence to ROI can stifle innovation because it tends to favor investments with clear, predictable returns. By focusing only on ROI, companies may miss out on opportunities to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions. 3. Holistic Value Creation Sometimes, the true value of an investment isn't captured by measuring direct returns but by its overall contribution to the company's objectives. This might include achieving regulatory compliance. The benefits are crucial for the business but may not be directly reflected in ROI calculations. 4. Cost of Opportunity Don't overlook the opportunity costs of not pursuing certain initiatives. Investments that offer adaptability in rapidly changing industries might have a lower immediate ROI but can provide significant value in terms of strategic positioning. I see this a ton in companies evaluating CX initiatives. What's the alternative? I think it's focusing on Business Value. What does this involve? Value Realization Frameworks: Implementing frameworks that assess the total impact of an investment, including financial, customer, employee, and operational impacts. Balanced Scorecard: Using tools like the Balanced Scorecard to evaluate performance across multiple dimensions, not just financial outcomes. Value Dashboards: Creating dashboards that track a variety of key performance indicators (KPIs) or Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) that reflect both short-term and long-term value creation. Shifting the focus from ROI to broader business value allows companies to align their investments more closely with strategic objectives and sustain competitive advantage in the long term. This approach also supports a more comprehensive evaluation of how initiatives contribute to the overarching goals of the organization vs. the short-term mentality that ROI can sometimes enable. How are you measuring value at your company? Or are you still stuck on ROI? #customerexperience #roi #returnoninvestment #ceo #cfo

Value creation decks are often 70% fluff and 30% recycled McKinsey slides. We’ve all seen them. Sleek formatting, lots of arrows pointing in bold directions. They’re the corporate equivalent of a Tinder profile. Great photos, zero substance, and you just know it’s not showing up when it’s time to commit. You get slides like: • “Capture revenue synergies through cross-sell enablement” • “Digitise the core via omni-channel transformation” • “Implement zero-based budgeting to unlock margin” It all sounds impressive, until you try to actually do any of it. Here’s the truth no one likes to say out loud. Most of these decks are written to impress investment committees, not to be executed by operators. They’re built backwards from strategy frameworks, not forwards from operational realities. Why does this keep happening? Because strategy consultants and junior PE associates are rewarded for insight density, not outcome clarity. It’s easier to throw 47 ideas at the wall than to commit to 3 that actually move EBITDA. So, we end up with 80-slide decks that: 1. Could be used for any company in any sector 2. Don’t prioritise initiatives based on impact or ease 3. Forget that execution lives or dies on resourcing, sequencing, and focus If your value creation plan can’t be understood by a COO, executed by a mid-level manager, and tracked by a dashboard, it’s not a value creation plan. It’s a presentation. Real value creation is messy, painful, and operationally brutal. It starts with hard trade-offs and a deep understanding of the actual levers inside the business. It looks more like this: • Rebuild the sales comp plan so reps stop gaming the funnel • Fire the agency that’s been charging $60k/month to “drive awareness” • Move customer service from “cost centre” to “retention engine” (or just fix the fact it takes 4 days to reply to an email) • Stop discounting like a mattress outlet and build real pricing power • Hire someone who understands digital • Restructure the org chart so people actually know who owns what • Re-platform the website so it doesn’t take 11 clicks to book a demo • Automate the 17-report circus your Head of Ops runs manually every Monday at 6am And it’s not a 4-year plan. It’s 90-day sprints with measurable outcomes. If it doesn’t show up in the P&L or the balance sheet, it’s noise. A good value creation plan reads less like a strategy paper and more like an ops playbook. Clear goals. Named owners. Defined KPIs. Timelines that scare people just enough to focus. Building decks is easy, building momentum is much harder. #ClaymorePartners #PrivateEquity #ValueCreation #ExecutionFirst #OperatingModel

My friend A. Lee Judge posted about struggling to "straddle the line" between content creator and sales consultant—being introduced as "the business podcast guy" one week and complimented on his "Sales and Marketing personal brand" the next. Lee, this isn't a branding problem. It's your competitive moat. Your inability to fit into a single box isn't confusion—it's market validation that you operate at the strategic intersection where real value gets created. Here's what I learned from my journey from Army Captain to Fortune 500 marketing executive to digital-first leadership expert: The market doesn't want you to be one thing. The market wants you to solve their problems. Today's most complex business challenges don't respect the artificial boundaries between "content creation," "sales strategy," and "operational execution." When you teach remote video production, you're not just delivering technical skills—you're showing sales teams how to create content that actually moves prospects through the pipeline. When you keynote sales events, you're providing strategic frameworks informed by your deep understanding of content creation and audience engagement. This is Strategic Convergence: where distinct professional competencies don't just coexist—they compound each other's effectiveness. Your TILT isn't content + sales. It's the unique way YOU connect content creation, sales strategy, and operational execution based on YOUR specific journey. Stop trying to pick a lane and start owning the intersection. The leaders who create the most value in today's complex business environment are the ones who can operate authentically across multiple strategic domains while helping others see the connections that drive results. Lee, you're not having a personal brand crisis. You're having a competitive advantage realization. To my audience listening in on this conversation with Lee, What's your experience with strategic convergence? How have you turned multiple areas of expertise into a single, powerful value proposition?

Negotiations don’t go wrong—they start wrong. Through my experience, I can often tell within the first 30 minutes whether a negotiation will take a collaborative or positional direction. The early signals—the tone, structure, and mindset of the parties—set the course for either value creation or value extraction. Too often, negotiations begin with adversarial positioning, where each side stakes out demands, focuses on "winning," and sees concessions as the primary path to agreement. This zero-sum mentality is where most negotiations start wrong. The problem isn’t what happens later—it’s how we approach the process from the outset. Do you negotiate how to negotiate before you start negotiating? This is a game-changer. Before discussing numbers or terms, set the stage for success. Consider opening with: "I am here today to help you reduce your risk, cost, and liabilities while improving your profits. Would you be interested in having me assist you with this?" This shifts the conversation from position-based bargaining to problem-solving and mutual value creation. SMARTnership® negotiation flips the traditional approach. Instead of defaulting to competitive bargaining, it starts by identifying asymmetric values, trust currency, and hidden gains that can turn the negotiation into a collaborative value-maximizing process. The real difference lies in: ✔ Mindset: Are we here to protect our own turf or explore mutual benefit?  ✔ Communication: Is the focus on claiming or creating value?  ✔ Trust: Is there openness to share real needs, costs, and priorities? If the first 30 minutes are spent staking positions, debating individual gains, or withholding critical information, the negotiation is already off track. But if we establish transparency, mutual benefit, and creative problem-solving early on, we unlock the hidden potential of the deal. Next time you step into a negotiation, ask yourself: Are we starting right? #Negotiation #SMARTnership #ValueCreation #TrustCurrency Tarek Amine Tine Anneberg Francis Goh, FSIArb, FCIArb Francisco Cosme Gražvydas Jukna Juan Manuel García P. Darryl Legault World Commerce & Contracting BMI Executive Institute #negotiationtraining Daniel McLuskie

LinkedIn gurus are divided. Some say that legacy FMCG is eroding revenue like a glacier, sweating in the endless summer of global warming. Others believe that D2C is a niche play that won’t scale. The answer is somewhere in the middle. Both will co-exist. But the undifferentiated middle will disappear. Technology has fundamentally fragmented the supply-side and demand-side layers that have supported the Great Indian FMCG industry for decades. 1. Contract R&D and manufacturing has made it easy to launch new products quickly 2. Ecommerce+quick commerce have made it easy to discover new brands, on an infinite retail shelf 3. Digital media has made it easy to discover new products As a result, the physical friction of product discovery and shopping has disappeared. But it has been replaced by cognitive overwhelm. When the brain drowns in choices, evolutionary hard wiring takes over and simplifies decisions. So, brand choice has become binary - unless the consumer gets EXACTLY what she wants, she REVERTS to the safe, trusted and familiar. I want a shampoo with vanilla fragrance that controls my frizz without making my hair sticky. If I can’t have that, I will buy Pantene. Ergo, the messy, undifferentiated middle of a thousand floral shampoos disappears. Alex Danco calls this barbell-shaped demand. I call it The Default and The Differentiated demand. That’s why, If you are planning to launch the 800th Niaciamide Serum in a Minimalist look-alike bottle which was a copy of The Ordinary, Stop!! You’ll fall into the Chasm of the Undifferentiated Middle. Never before has the need for differentiation been more dire. Never before have product propositions been more 'copy-pasted' than before. That's Strategy Blindness™. ______________ This thinking has been inspired by Alex Danco's article on Abundance for the tech world. I write for consumer leaders who know their strategy looks right but feels wrong. If you want to read more like this, link to my newsletter is in my profile.

Meta Robyn vs Google Meridian: Which MMM solution is best for your brand? If you are a brand investing >$5M/year on paid media, choosing the right Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) solution is key when looking to optimize your marketing spend and drive growth. Two popular options have emerged: Meta's Robyn and Google's Meridian. But which one is better suited for e-commerce brands? Let's break it down: Meta Robyn: - Open-source and highly customizable - Integrates well with Facebook's ecosystem - Offers granular insights into organic and paid social media performance - Provides advanced features like budget allocation and diminishing returns modeling - Steeper learning curve due to its R-based implementation - May require more data science expertise to implement effectively Google Meridian: - User-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality - Seamless integration with Google Analytics and Google Ads - Offers automated insights and recommendations - Includes built-in forecasting capabilities - Less flexible for custom modeling scenarios - Potentially biased towards Google's advertising ecosystem The Verdict: While both solutions have their merits, Meta Robyn edges out for e-commerce brands, especially those heavily invested in social channels. Its open-source nature allows for greater customization to fit specific e-commerce needs, and its advanced modeling capabilities can provide deeper insights into the complex, multi-channel nature of e-commerce marketing. However, for brands with limited data science resources or those deeply integrated into the Google ecosystem, Meridian offers a more accessible entry point into MMM. Ultimately, the choice depends on your brand's specific needs, resources, and marketing mix.

Segmentation is a powerful tool in data science—by grouping entities with similar characteristics, companies can tailor experiences, drive growth, and better meet the needs of distinct customer or supply groups. In a recent blog post, Airbnb’s data science team shared how they built a structured framework to segment their global supply into distinct “supply personas.” Rather than using traditional approaches like RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis, they grounded the segmentation in the platform’s unique business dynamics—especially calendar-based behaviors that reflect how listings are used throughout the year. The team began with exploratory analysis and identified four key behavioral features: availability rate, streakiness, the number of quarters with availability, and the maximum consecutive months of availability. These signals were then fed into an unsupervised clustering model (k-means) to group similar listings. To make the results interpretable and usable at scale, the clusters were used to train a supervised model (i.e., a decision tree), allowing for consistent and scalable persona assignments. This framework enables Airbnb to apply a shared language around supply—supporting decisions in personalization, experimentation, and beyond. It’s a nice example of how thoughtful segmentation can bridge human intuition, modeling techniques, and operational needs. #DataScience #MachineLearning #Analytics #Airbnb #Segmentation #MLInterpretability #SnacksWeeklyonDataScience – – –  Check out the "Snacks Weekly on Data Science" podcast and subscribe, where I explain in more detail the concepts discussed in this and future posts:    -- Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gKgaMvbh   -- Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gFYvfB8V    -- Youtube: https://lnkd.in/gcwPeBmR https://lnkd.in/gBu4gKpz

Value creation in a private equity environment revolves around systematically enhancing a portfolio company’s performance to achieve strong returns at exit. In my recent role as Go-to-Market Advisor for a cutting-edge AI-led health tech startup in the UK at Series B, I developed a comprehensive commercial strategy that rapidly boosted recurring revenue by 30% within 12 months. A key breakthrough emerged when we discovered extended integration timelines were deterring smaller clinics and hospital networks from adopting our solution. By designing a flexible onboarding framework, we reduced implementation time by 40% and reinvested these savings into predictive analytics features—enabling clinicians to forecast patient needs and administrators to allocate resources more effectively. Here’s a concise six-step roadmap for delivering tangible results: 1. Due Diligence: Pinpoint growth levers and operational bottlenecks pre-acquisition. 2. 100-Day Plan: Establish quick wins—revamp pricing structures, refine workflows, and optimise early partnerships. 3. Organisational Excellence: Assess leadership, align incentives with performance outcomes, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. 4. Accelerated Growth: Perfect go-to-market strategies, drive product innovation, and explore targeted acquisitions or strategic alliances. 5. Ongoing Optimisation: Monitor KPIs rigorously, remain agile, and leverage real-time data insights to pivot swiftly. 6. Exit Preparation: Ensure robust financial reporting, demonstrate sustained operational gains, and plan a smooth transition for new owners. Throughout each phase, transparency and collaboration are vital. Regular, data-driven updates to board members, management teams, and front-line staff help secure buy-in and maintain accountability. Ultimately, true value creation goes beyond financial engineering. It’s about generating sustainable growth, driving innovation, strengthening the organisation’s culture, and positioning the business for long-term success. By following a deliberate plan and staying laser-focused on top-line expansion and bottom-line efficiency, we set the stage for a transformative exit that benefits stakeholders and the broader healthcare ecosystem alike.

There isn’t one pricing strategy that drives upgrades. What works depends on how and when customers realise value. A recent PricingSaaS breakdown highlighted five different approaches teams are using. They’re not silver bullets, but each solves a specific mismatch between pricing and usage. 1. Change the billing cadence ↳ Moving from monthly to quarterly or annual billing gives customers more time to see value before a renewal decision. ↳ This works best when time-to-value isn’t instant and early churn is driven by impatience rather than lack of fit. 2. Rethink what you meter ↳ Some teams removed limits like user caps and shifted to usage metrics closer to real value. ↳ The upgrade trigger becomes growth in usage, not hitting an artificial ceiling. 3. Use add-ons as a discovery path ↳ Add-ons let customers try advanced capabilities without committing to a higher tier. ↳ They work well when value is clear only after hands-on use. 4. Price onboarding and support intentionally: ↳ Defaulting to self-serve onboarding and reserving human support for higher tiers aligns cost with commitment. ↳ It also signals where the product expects customers to be more serious. 5. Adjust the entry point: ↳ Raising the floor price or tightening the lowest tier can naturally push customers toward plans where upgrades make more sense economically. Across all five, the pattern is alignment. Pricing works when it follows customer behaviour, not when it tries to correct it. Which part of your pricing feels most disconnected from how customers actually use your product today?

Your pricing is not just a number. It is a strategic decision that determines how much value you extract from the market. Ask: are you offering unique, or are you selling a commodity? You can differentiate in three ways: ✔️ Quality of Offering – Better materials, craftsmanship, or service. ✔️ Branding & Market Positioning – The emotional and visual cues customers associate with you. ✔️ Diversification of Offerings – Expanding or specializing to target specific customer segments. Your pricing should reflect perceived value. Are you charging what your brand is worth? If your product is worth $20, aim to extract $19.95—not out of greed, but because that’s what customers value it at. Every pricing decision should reinforce a clear market position. Refine your message, then align your pricing with the value your customers already see.