3 Steps to Segmenting Your Book of Business

Companies today typically expect more of their employee benefits advisers than they did 10 or 20 years ago. They're asking: How does what you're going to show me today go beyond carrier and price? What's on the horizon that I need to be aware of? In this type of environment, most advisers find that they are more productive — and profitable — if they develop specialized messages and capabilities for different segments of their book of business. Here are three ideas for segmenting your book so you can focus and specialize:

1. Separate your customers by group size. Choose whatever size ranges make sense to you — e.g. under 50 employees, 50 to 100, 100 to 250, over 250.
2. Next, score each customer by level of sophistication, with a 1 being relatively unsophisticated and a 5 being as highly sophisticated as you can handle. You'll probably see some correlation between group size and sophistication.
3. Finally, score each customer on a 1 to 5 scale based on how well your perspective on employee benefits aligns with the perspectives of the decision makers at the company. If you rarely see eye to eye, give them a 1. If you click on almost everything, they get a 5.

Now look at all the customers who are of similar size, sophistication and shared perspective. You'll probably notice that, in addition to these shared characteristics, your customers are predominantly concentrated in two or three industries. You may want to consider why you’ve done well in those industries and focus on building on those strengths.