Segment Development Plans: Win New Deals From a Slice of the Market

Win new business from accounts that share a common characteristic. This way, you can build your brand and create efficiencies.

In this episode, John and Mark explore how firms can build Segment Development Plans that help firms grow relationships with prospects that represent a specific kind of client account. Combining SWOT analysis with targeted marketing efforts, business developers can use these plans to create a distinctive brand presence. In this conversation, we cover:

• Different ways to group segments of the market
• Why you tailor your offers for specific groups of the market
• How to perform a SWOT analysis to align strengths with opportunities
• Other considerations for your firm’s Segment Development Plan

Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhwainwright/
Connect with John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

www.breakingbizdev.com

Transcript

John Tyreman: 0:19

Welcome back business developers, doers, sellers, marketers, firm leaders to another episode of breaking biz dev. I'm John he's Mark. And today we're going to break down how you can create new business opportunities within industries or markets you're familiar with. We call these segments. I'm excited to dive into this. Mark, how are you doing today?

Mark Wainwright: 0:41

I'm great. That's so funny, John. You just invited everybody in the entire planet. Everybody just bring your whole firm. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that.

John Tyreman: 0:48

There's a number of different ways to develop new business. You know, doer sellers, dedicated BD professionals. So, you know, we want to be encompassing of all. It's a big tent here at Breaking Biz Dev. We want to make sure that all firms of all sizes are able to develop business.

Mark Wainwright: 1:03

Yeah. I read Something recently. Someone did some very extensive research and I think we may touch on this in a, future episode that I shared with you that says that funny little do or seller thing is growing significantly in the, in the industry. And I've said it all along, John, that. The do or seller is, the most client centric way to build new business. And we may have people that listen to this, who are dedicated new business development folks. and yeah, I get that some firms are just built that way. And, and I'm certain that, those individuals who listen, particularly those who are in our audience, John, because they're the pros, we know that, But yeah, the doer sellers are the people who are client facing. And, in this, complex world of professional services, your clients want to do business, want to develop new business with the experts. So yeah, doer sellers are a growing, consistently growing percentage of hopefully our, our audience and of how all those firms out there develop a business. And these segment development plans are a tool that those, Doer sellers and their business development team members, and frankly, even their marketing team members can use together in a, collaborative way to find and win some new business,

John Tyreman: 2:23

well, that's part of why I'm really excited about this one is because there are a lot of marketing components to the, these segment development plans. and just to reprise our listeners, we had a series of episodes that went out, probably a few months ago at this point, around your framework, create choreograph and contract. And within that series, we talked about these four different layers. I like to call them of your addressable market. If you think about like a bullseye at the very center, you've got people that you're familiar with. And then the next rung out is organizations that you're familiar with. And then out from there. Our industries or markets that you're familiar with. That's what we're going to focus on today. and then there's even another layer outside of that, which is the great unknown we like to call, but today we're really focused on developing a segment plan for the industries or markets that you are familiar with, that you want to grow intentionally in that direction.

Mark Wainwright: 3:22

right? And, these plans start with. Maybe there's just one client that you started working with in, in healthcare industry, right? Let's use that an example, regardless of what kind of consultant you are. And then there's another, and then there's another, and maybe you've got a collection of clients that are in the same industry. So you take a step back and you think, Hey, I think we've got some. Expertise in this area, and I think we have something to offer to other potential clients in that same industry or market, right? And I use the term segment with this because it's not just industries and not just markets. It could be geographies. it could be just other types of groupings. It could be the size of firms you know, we feel that we have this, Specific offer, or this capability of this expertise for firms that are tiny or firms that are, large, you know, it varies. So a segment from my perspective is just any grouping of potential and existing firms that you want to do work with, or you have done work with who are similar, who you can kind of draw a circle around them and call them a group, right? And that's a segment,

John Tyreman: 4:36

I've always found that interesting. And I think that there's so many different ways to categorize businesses. Another one might be like the organizational structure. Like we only work with partnership. Organizations that are structured via partnership or we only work with, private equity backed firms, you know, there's a number of different ways that you can slice and dice it. And I think that's kind of the point we're making is, you know, segment doesn't have to be just a couple of these different criteria is it's really. Where do you provide unique value and how do you categorize that segment of the market?

Mark Wainwright: 5:06

right. And you want it to be big enough. that there's a, they're there, but you don't want it to be so big. They can't get your arms wrapped around it, right? You can't define the edges of it, that it's just this massive circle. So it should be kind of reasonable, approachable, addressable. so it's, something you can kind of get your arms wrapped around.

John Tyreman: 5:24

Yep. And we've mentioned on the show multiple times, this notion of a marketing and sales continuum and so in your mind, Mark, where did these segment development plans live on that continuum?

Mark Wainwright: 5:38

Yeah, it requires a good bit of work and some expertise and some focus with, both. So in the name of avoiding the messy middle, I almost feel like we want to jump back and forth between a two and a four kind of a thing, because really, There are, very important critical marketing activities that are focused with this planning exercise, as well as some one to one sales conversations that hopefully, we'll produce some, some new opportunities. So, like I said, in, in order to avoid the threes where nobody knows what's going on, where the vast majority of our lovely business developers. Friends sort of live. I would say it requires of, partnership really, between the marketing resources and marketing, marketing expertise in your organization and the sales end of things. So yeah, it's a little bit of both.

John Tyreman: 6:27

I'm reminded of a, an episode we did recently, I think, in how inbound and outbound compliment each other. And that I'm, I'm, I'm sensing come some kind of shades of that here in developing these plans. So what's the purpose of a segment development plan?

Mark Wainwright: 6:45

The purpose of these plans are to grow your connections and opportunities in a focused. Segment with a specific focused offering. And we'll, we've talked a little bit about what that segment thing is. And we'll get to what I mean by a specific focused offering, but that's the goal. That's the big why, but there's a whole bunch of other wise, right? It's, leveraging these existing relationships you have on a particular segment or, or market to gain introductions, accelerates trust, right? And understanding, right? You're able to bring your relevant knowledge to new organizations that are very similar to ones you've worked with in the past. your, your expertise, the amount of trust you can develop, your ability to be trustworthy, is accelerated with this process rather than just, like, Throwing darts at a dartboard. when we focus in a particular industry or market, it lets us be experts, right? It lets us bring our true proven time tested expertise. And lets us avoid sort of we're everything to everyone scenario where we are unfocused, where we are generalists, uh, the reason that's so important, John is, that I truly believe if a potential client has the option of choosing to work with a generalist or a focused expert, they will more often than not choose the focused expert because the focused expert is simply, to mitigate risk, they mitigate any chances of anything going wrong because they've been there, seen it, they've done it, and that's what the expertise is all about. and last little bit of these, one of the, great reasons why is that it lets our close connections in that, market, in that segment. Help us grow and succeed, right? These are people that we've worked with in the past, like, you know, we use our healthcare industry example. Maybe we've served them well, and there's others in that industry. We can serve. Those people are guaranteed connected to others throughout the industry, and they would love for us to be successful, with others. So, yeah, it helps people who are close to us help us.

John Tyreman: 8:44

I like that. seems like your perspective is really focused on the people in the relationships. As we were planning for this episode, I was kind of thinking through this, like, why is it important to have a segment development plan? And some of the reasons that I came up with were slanted towards the marketing side of things. Like, for example, coming up with a segment development plan and executing on that absolutely strengthens your brand reputation within that market. So your healthcare example from earlier, maybe that happens by chance, or maybe that happens over time from you do great work for one healthcare client. They give you a referral and then over time you build up a portfolio. Well, if you really lean into that and position yourself around that, and then point to those, projects or past performance that absolutely strengthens your brand. So that's one of them. Another one that I, that I noticed was kind of like an operational one. Where if you're doing great work for clients within a particular segment, maybe you've identified common traits among those different segments or clients that represent your ideal client profile within that segment, then you create operational efficiencies.

Mark Wainwright: 9:53

Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. And that, that, that makes me think of that conversation we had about account development plans. It's very similar to that. We've just gotten to know that client well. and getting to know an industry can be, you know, kind of, kind of similar.

John Tyreman: 10:06

So I guess kind of like the antithesis of that is like, okay, well, if these account development plans are so important, then why don't more firms pursue this as kind of like a growth lever?

Mark Wainwright: 10:19

Yeah. Well, we get distracted. Everybody gets distracted from the work that's in front of us. And these take some proactivity. They take some energy, these can be hard. Right. It's because again, we're in that world of create here, right? we can't just be expecting, 10 new healthcare clients to just show up at the front door. We have to do stuff, both from a marketing perspective and sort of a prospecting sales perspective. We have to be proactive. And when we do this, and again, we'll talk more about this focused expertise thing, but I think it's critical when we are being proactive. We really need to be focused. A lot of people have a tough time being focused. I know. I talked to a lot of professionals, particularly folks kind of in the design world that think, Oh, we want to just design all different kinds of things. You know, we don't want to get bored with one particular thing. We don't want to focus too much on one particular thing, but I think it's critical when we are trying to grow in a specific way. Focused market or segment that we really have something to offer something specific, something, irresistible with clients. It says, Oh, my gosh, you guys are the experts with that particular thing, right? And being, diffuse or unfocused makes it hard. Makes it hard for them to differentiate us from others, right? If we're approaching someone new, we say, Oh my gosh, we do everything to everyone and you should hire us. They'll say, yeah, okay, get in line. There's 20 other companies that want to work with us that do the exact same sort of everything. Right? So those are a couple of things. kind of speculative, right? So you're going to get some yeses, but you're also going to get some noes. Some people don't, like this. And, you know, they, they demand that we lean on our existing contacts for their help. Right. And I mentioned before is that that's one of the reasons why they're wonderful. So people out there who want to help us, but one of the hard parts is asking. right. I don't know. Right. So, so there's plenty of people out there who want to help you and in focused industries, you just have to ask. And sometimes that's hard.

John Tyreman: 12:14

seems like there's maybe some selfishness. At play here for, you know, we want to do the kind of work we want to do. It's not very client centric where it's, we do great work in this one industry and that's why you should, hire us. and then it's a little bit selfish and I don't want to be put outside of my comfort zone and have these conversations. Right. So I think, I guess in order to grow, you do need to step outside of that comfort zone. So I guess selecting the kinds of industries to go after, you know, sometimes that can be super clear, like our healthcare example, you know, you get referrals and you grow a body of work, but maybe sometimes it's not as Which segment to go after, or maybe there's multiple segments you could go after. So let's have a conversation, Mark, around how to identify the segments to pursue.

Mark Wainwright: 13:06

Well,

John Tyreman: 13:07

do you

Mark Wainwright: 13:07

is. Yeah, this is where, maybe people who are involved with specific client accounts, maybe in client, service delivery, maybe these doers sellers, these folks really need to start to lean into their marketing team because the marketing team are the folks that are going to have their eyeballs on the horizon a little bit more than others that are doing their work. So, this is where this collaboration comes in, in that. Hopefully your marketing team has access to market research, knows what's, coming, understands, or, can kind of read the tea leaves or look at the crystal ball or, whatever it is, to really help you determine where to focus because you don't want to focus on a segment, obviously that's not growing, doesn't have a particular need, right. Isn't evolving, you know, maybe you did something spectacular for a handful of organizations in that industry, but. Maybe that need doesn't exist anymore. Maybe things are changing really quickly. So, you need to turn to your, experts internally who should be aware of what's happening out there.

John Tyreman: 14:04

It's, it's almost like you've got to qualify. The segment, right. And you need to do that through a series of conversations with, key players in the industry, right? So you, maybe you go out and you talk to, past clients or existing prospects, or maybe they're teaming partners within that segment. Sorry, I said industry segment. You know, maybe employees have certain perspective on the segment that you're going after. And that's absolutely something that you should take into account. and so I think that that's one place to turn to, to kind of validate whether or not that's a segment worth pursuing. I think a lot of it too, is you need to turn into a consumer, right? Go out and read industry publications, or go out and consume the top podcasts within the segment that you want to go after to really understand, you know, is this a pool that I want to play in? Right.

Mark Wainwright: 14:57

Yeah. And, almost the counter of that is that sometimes areas of focus, these segments, of these things we can draw a big circle around are screamingly obvious and. Just staring you in the face and people don't recognize them, and I'll engage some of my clients in these conversations and say, look, I'm sensing there's a handful of connections and you've had some success. And it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of competition in this 1 particular area. And they say, oh, yeah, I guess so. I guess you're right. So, Sometimes it takes sort of just a couple conversations to uncover the screamingly obvious areas of focus. You know, I have, client who does some work, in the cyber security world. and, there's not a day that goes by. That isn't, ripped from the headline stuff. It seems like every day, every week, there's something major happening. And, there's a lot of activity. There's a lot of stuff going on, many challenges. And, you know, it happens all the way from, the government level, all the way down to organizational level. but also it's hard. it's extremely difficult for people in that industry to, to do the work they do and they need all the help they can get. So, yeah, that was one of my sort of screamingly obvious conversations. It's like, wow, you're doing this particular thing with this particular industry, and it seems like there's a, it seems like there's a, they're there. And they say, oh yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, there might be a, they're there.

John Tyreman: 16:17

So maybe folks could just get caught up there or in tunnel vision or like within their own little echo chambers and they don't really understand, you know, they don't see the opportunity. I guess that's one of the values of bringing in outside perspective, fresh perspective into kind of like say, Hey, you could be doing X, Y, and Z. And you're not. I guess some other, other ways that you could go about identifying and prioritizing some of those segments. I mean, obviously like revenue analysis comes to mind, not just like looking through, okay, well, let's filter by just all of our healthcare clients, but I would, recommend is folks take a look at what are, are the best performing clients or what are the clients that represent the highest revenue potential and what are the common characteristics? Maybe it's not industry. maybe it's something completely different. Maybe it's size or maybe there's key relationships, the point of contact that you're working with. So there could be a number of different factors, but I think that's one way that folks can really. Identify which segments to pursue.

Mark Wainwright: 17:14

Yeah. Good. You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 17:18

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 17:32

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 17:42

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 17:48

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 17:51

So let's shift gears and talk about executing on a segment development plan. Let's say that we've identified the segment. We've got a clear idea of the segment that we want to go after. Where do we start with developing a segment plan,

Mark Wainwright: 18:06

Good. I'll just run through sort of the steps in the, in the process real quick. So it's, you know, we have to prioritize and select important, groups, important segments. We have to create an internal team, including internal marketing team. members. So it's not just the folks who are client facing. These are others who have industry knowledge, industry awareness, and, content development skills, because, eventually these plans are going to require some, use of existing content or the development of whole new. Content. So we start to develop the plan internally with what we know. And then the big step in all of these planning exercises is we have to engage our existing context, relationships, clients in this particular industry, in these curious conversations to figure out what's going on in their world, what's pressing, what's a priority, you know, all those types of things, because there's only so much information we can come up with on ourselves. We have to go talk to our clients in this particular segment and see what the future holds. We need to set goals for this whole effort. And throughout all of that, we need to develop a targeted offering that we can go and present to new prospects. And again, we'll talk about that targeted offering, but we have to be able to be super clear about what our offer is when we enter this. This marketplace. Sure. We've got some expertise, but we don't want to show up at the front door and say, we do everything for everybody. We want to have an offer that's laser sharp, so we need to develop that.

John Tyreman: 19:33

I'm sensing that there's a few different key pieces that need to be in place before you can actually start to run with this plan, the offer being a really critical one. And that stems from, identifying the segment that you're going after. Right? So you need to identify the segment that you're going after, I would argue that developing that offer is probably the next step, right?

Mark Wainwright: 19:54

This plan actually kind of similar to the accountant development plan exercise that we talked through It needs that purpose principles, vision sort of approach where you were right out of the bat, you say, okay, so why are we doing this? Why is this important to us? What are our principles in garden? Yeah. What are the guardrails, right? What are we going to do? What are we not going to do? if we start heading into industry and, either the offers and resonating or, uh, The effort is taking us to somewhere where we shouldn't be, or we shouldn't go, or, we find ourselves in this place where we're just trying to be everything to everybody, maybe, that's where we stop, right. And then vision, what's our picture of success? So I think there's a good baseline start there. Then I think an important component of this is just a basic sort of SWOT analysis. Where we can distill our internal strengths and weaknesses, and then, with our research and understanding, we can start to identify these external threats. And opportunities.

John Tyreman: 20:51

Okay. And then from there, the content development, if you compare and contrast a segment development plan to an account development plan, an account development plan, there's really a lot of one on one communication that happens. Whereas when you're developing a segment plan, there's really a one to many communication that happens. and if these are do or sellers that are listening to this and the ones that are going to be on the hook for creating the content, I think this is where you really need to lean into your skills. Are you a better writer? Or are you a better speaker? And if you're a better writer, then maybe email marketing, blogging, social media might be your bag. But if you're a better speaker, then maybe podcasting webinars and videos might be a better content to kind of put out there.

Mark Wainwright: 21:33

Yeah, this is the point, you know, you've done that SWOT analysis. Hopefully you've come up with sort of this offer, where we fit in the universe, you know, what is our offer to this segment? What do we do well or better than others? and, what is the specific focused offer that we have? And then you can start develop all this fantastic content around that, your goal here, we've Maybe use this term in the past. I know I've heard about it is that you want to become a, recognized authority, a visible authority you want to be, recognized in the marketplace, not just, from the sort of resume or project list of work completed, but also your perspective. that you put out into the marketplaces is one that's widely embraced and elevates you to that point of being a recognized authority. So we find out what that specific offer is, we pull together existing content, and then we also develop new content. And this new content is 1 to many content, and then hopefully transitions to 1 to 1 content that we can use in these conversations. You know, the Hey, great introductory meeting. So nice to meet you. I'm going to follow that up with, this little piece of information. Is it okay if I, send you a link to, a podcast that I appeared on recently where I talked about this exact topic, So that, that kind of a thing.

John Tyreman: 22:49

All right, Mark, we've teased this offer quite a few times in this episode. I want to dig into that. So let's talk about developing a focused offer for. Your segment that you're going after. So like, where do you, where do we start in developing this? Is that an output of the SWOT analysis?

Mark Wainwright: 23:06

Me just, define the focused offer and why I think this is so important. And then I think that we can do one or the other, but let's talk about this focused offer. I think is really important. And I hinted at it a few times already. Right. So people generally will choose. Narrowly focused expertise over general knowledge, I could be challenged on that, John, but I really think that's the case, right? Given choice A and choice B, obviously, there's other factors that kind of go into that all of the things relatively equal. I think people will choose expertise over knowledge, particularly if there's not a relationship there. Right. This is a new relationship that we're looking to establish, we will choose someone who is narrowly focused expertise over general knowledge. When you have deeper expertise in a focused it's easier to substantiate, right? You can just back it up. Look, here's all the stuff. here's our work, right? I think a focused offer. Is a fantastic way to start a new relationship because typically your focused offer is, is something, like I said, that's focused. It's typically something you can, everybody can get their hands wrapped around. It's not something that's going to be this, foggy mess of, uh, undetermined scope. It's something fairly tight and you can kind of understand it. So you can deliver it with a high level of confidence and you can do so profitably. And the client is. Yeah. Stoked, right? They're just, Oh my gosh, that was fantastic. You guys did an amazing job at that one thing. We appreciate it. That was wonderful. we've established ourselves with a focused offer. They come back to us and they say, you guys did a great job. you did a incredibly well, can you do B, C and D? And you say, Oh, by the way, yes, we can. so this whole thing builds trust and presents you as being trustworthy for the future. Right? So that's what a focused offer is. And that's why I think a focused offer is so critical. you're offering this little gem to a new prospective client that, you know, That you can absolutely deliver, exceed their expectations, all that stuff, right? And then the next obvious step is they start becoming a longterm client of yours and it starts from there. So that's my whole, whole idea on this whole focused offer.

John Tyreman: 25:10

this focused offer in your mind. Is that a paid engagement or is that a free offer? It's a paid engagement.

Mark Wainwright: 25:16

So yeah, I'm, I'm a, I'm not, I'm not a fan. What depends on the industry, John, but I, you know, I, some industries can scale a hyper focused little tiny offer to them and do it as sort of a freemium intro thing. I rarely ever suggest people offer things for free because guess what precedent that sets. We'll do more stuff for free. I mean, it's really hard to walk someone up from, to being a, top dollar client of yours, or at least it takes a really long time. so yeah, I think it's probably something that is, of reasonable size and scope and dollars that, is low risk for a prospective client and is something that the value of it screams at them, you know, the, Oh my gosh, this is such a great deal just is obvious.

John Tyreman: 26:02

I think there's a couple of factors at play. there's the tribe before you buy type of thing, right? Where, if this introductory offer or this focused offer is maybe it's a bite of the apple. And so they understand what it's like to work with you. You understand what it's like to work with them. And so you've got a good understanding of, okay, is there some, they're there, right? Is this a relationship worth expanding?

Mark Wainwright: 26:25

It's a good test. Exactly.

John Tyreman: 26:26

And I think another part of it is with this focus offer, you're not spinning your wheels, trying to develop a big, robust solution right out of the gate. That's really important in a number of different ways. Number one, going to cut the tribe before we buy, like we talked about, but then also, if a client pays you once, they're more likely to pay again. Right. And so it becomes easier for them to give you money. You've already established, you know, all of that.

Mark Wainwright: 26:52

And that's where the, the SWOT analysis rolls into this whole thing is that people probably have experience with a SWOT analysis in the past. They probably have experience with ones done poorly, you know, where there's this laundry list of all these things we do well, and a very short list of all the weaknesses. There's a long list of external marketplace opportunities and a very short list of threats. And I generally, those are with blinders on. With people who are, overly optimistic, all of that stuff, the confirmation bias starts coming into this whole thing. so I think the power of the SWOT analysis is to approach it kind of open eyed and really honestly and say, look, we have to be reasonable and if a hundred percent clear about what our internal strengths are, because I think the reality is, When organizations strip everything away, particularly with developing new business, you have to come down with a really tight list of strengths because there's probably a whole ton of weaknesses out there maybe some you're not even aware of the same way. There's probably very, very few opportunities that match with that strength and a long list of threats again, that you're completely unaware of. So, that's what this focus is. it maximizes your strengths and the opportunities in the marketplace and it minimizes your weaknesses and the threats out there. And that puts you in a position, right? And from that, you can develop. The statement, right? This unique selling proposition, this unique value proposition, that is what you go and take to the marketplace.

John Tyreman: 28:14

Love that. Love that. I love how this all kind of dovetails to and how these segment development plans segue very naturally into account development plans. expanding those concentric circles out into the marketplace. Well, Mark, this has just been a fascinating conversation. I love this, choreography that needs to happen between, you know, marketing roles and sit and selling and, how that plays out in the industry and content development and then developing accounts. love this dance.

Mark Wainwright: 28:43

I think one thing that is worthwhile to talk about, after we've developed this offer is the supporting content that we have to either pull together that we already have or stuff we have to make that supports this unique offer. And one of the things that that does is it gives your marketing team. And, you know, your doer sellers or your business development team members, it gives them a super tight focus, which, you know, that's one of my favorite words on the planet. John is focused, right? All too often. We find ourselves just. Unfocused, right? Your marketing team is unfocused. you don't know what content to create. You don't know what to write about. So you don't know what to focus on, but this is finding that 1 thing that you can beat the drum on again and again and again. So supporting content, you know, what do we have online? You know, what presentations do we have? What podcast do we have? What client testimonials? What social proof do we have out in the world? Do we have any sort of case studies or client success stories that we've built? So the supporting content. Is critical from a, building that broad one to many awareness and then hopefully in those engaged one to one conversations.

John Tyreman: 29:54

totally, totally. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with BJ Kramer, who is the host of inspiring people in places. And he talked about, the message and the messenger and the recipient are the three ingredients to that communication, challenge, right. Or that communication equation. And so I think one of the things that's really important is understanding who those players are in the industry that need to receive. The communications, so prospective clients, absolutely. I think it's important to understand the competitors in the industry, who are you going up against? Cause that can inform, your points of differentiation or what topics you're going to talk about, or that might influence the point of view that you take with the content that you're putting out there. Influencers in the marketplace, like, can you co create content with influencers in the marketplace? are there opportunities to co brand a webinar or to, have one of those folks on as a podcast guest or you want as a guest on their show and then, are there strategic partnership opportunities out there? So maybe you're selling into. Health care organizations. Well, maybe there's a health tech company that sells into healthcare organizations too. And maybe it was, it'd be worthwhile to. See if there are, you know, ways that you can swap notes or share referrals or things like that.

Mark Wainwright: 31:16

Absolutely. And nice part about developing content in an area, in a segment where you already have a presence, where you already have connections is that you can test it all. you can test all the content, if it's a, a new written piece or whatever it is, a podcast or a presentation, right? You just test it, right? You test it with your contacts in that industry that, You can just ask a simple question. Does this resonate, right? Is this, relevant and important to your industry now and in the future? And is this valuable information that, we could share with, people outside of your organization, and they would Find it useful, and hopefully, you they can provide some edits and some comments and things like that. Again, that's the great part here about, growing in this focused way is that you can develop and then test this content with sort of your existing network and then use it. To expand,

John Tyreman: 32:14

So step one, identify the segments to go after step to figure out what that focused offer is, and then find a way to develop the content, to, bring visibility toward that offer and have that be a call to action within the content is, Hey, take the next step. Let's have a conversation around, you know, how we can explore this focused. Offer for you.

Mark Wainwright: 32:36

right? Again, this is, this is all done in, collaboration with your network in this particular market, you just, any type of planning exercise that you try to develop and then execute on is so much better when it has sort of the voice of the customer or the voice of the client and in it, right? So, early and often you need to bring your Clients or your contacts into this planning exercise to constantly test and refine your message, your offer so that ultimately you can create something that is really, really compelling to new perspective clients in the industry. And hopefully it's a simple yes for them.

John Tyreman: 33:19

Well, this has been great, Mark. I think this has been a great conversation around segment development plans and how experts firms, practitioners, business developers of all stripes can start to reinforce their brand and become more well known and attract more clients and create the kind of business that they really want with the clients they want to work with

Mark Wainwright: 33:41

Agreed until next time, John.

John Tyreman: 33:44

until next time.