INTRODUCTION

The process of partitioning business customers into groups with similar needs or
characteristics continues to be an imperative way to generate additional value for customers.
It is good way to gain a strategic edge over competitors that may still be treating customers in
a more one size fits all manner. And newly introduced technologies have effectively made
analyzing huge amounts of data a much quicker and easier task.

A marketing manager can effectively improve a cross sell campaign response rate when he or
she knows exactly which of the company’s customers have the highest propensity to purchase
and understands which message or value propositions are most likely to click with the target
audience. The manager can also make reasonable assumptions regarding the greater market at
large by using valuable key insights from customer segmentation studies and putting these
insights into action when it comes to designing new customer acquisition programs.

Deploying an effective segmentation comes with costs and each functional unit that uses the
this approach is likely to have to make changes to either the product or processes and
sometimes both. To maximize the value of customer segmentation, the outputs may need to
be integrated into transactional systems , which can serve up the segment score to marketers
on a demand basis. A cost-benefit analysis is appropriate in determining whether these
changes will pay off in the near term or down the road. Segmentation is also not a remedy for
all organizational deficiencies and it requires a significant level of commitment from the top
down. Executive support makes or breaks the best of plans for customer segmentation.

To further elaborate on segmentation and targeting of IBM we take two industry solutions as
examples.

1. IBM Multi-Vendor Support System

2. IBM Watson IoT Platform
 IBM MULTI-VENDOR SUPPORT SYSTEM
IBM data centre maintenance and support services provide end-to-end integrated data centre
maintenance and IT support. Your business gets a single, cost-effective source for keeping
your entire IT environment optimized. Problems are quickly resolved, and vendors are
streamlined, saving time and reducing cost.
They offer integrated hardware and software maintenance to support you wherever you are in
your journey to cloud. Unlike third-party maintenance providers who typically cover a niche
of your IT environment, IBM’s comprehensive data centre support services cover products
from IBM and other OEMs, including servers, storage, network, appliances and software,
helping you to ensure high availability across your data centre and hybrid cloud environment.
They also help businesses unlock actionable insights and quickly resolve issues.

Benefits of IBM Multivendor Support

● IBM MVS extends existing data-center investments, freeing up capital for

strategic priorities.​ With IBM MVS, interviewees and surveyed organizations
could extend existing investments in their data centers. Forty-two percent of
survey respondents noted that MVS helped them defer or save on their capital
expenses by extending the useful lifetime of their various hardware solutions.
These respondents noted that their investment in MVS saved them
approximately 14% of their capital budgets by deferring these expenses.
● IBM helps customers avoid critical incidents while also reducing the time it
took to resolve remaining incidents.​ Several survey respondents saw a
reduction in their mean-time-to-repair after transitioning their support to IBM
MVS. Survey respondents reported a 22% reduction in their MTTR after their
transitioning to IBM. In addition to reducing the time it took to resolve
incidents, 22% of the surveyed organizations reported that they saw a reduction
in the total number of incidents they faced on an annual basis.
● IBM MVS helps customers improve the quality of service they could
provide their customers.​ Fifty-three percent of the surveyed organizations
stated that MVS increased the quality of the service their organizations
provided. Part of this was due to increases in internal quality controls. Half of
respondents noted that IBM MVS helped them increase the accuracy of their
internal inventory.
CUSTOMER NEEDS

IBM identified the following problem areas with multiple single vendors that it needs to
address-

Marketers map these problem areas with the needs of businesses to understand what business
they should be in. Marketers can segment customers based on their needs. This offers the
marketer the most accurate way to target customer segments. It is highly scalable because the
marketer can designate as many needs-based segments as preferred.

Following are the customers need that IBM has identified-

a) Difficulty reduction.​ Working with just one vendor ensures a higher level of
compatibility between project components. With a multi-vendor approach, there is
always a risk that separate components or solutions may prove to be incompatible
with each other.
b) Workflow optimization.​ You can build communication processes with the vendor
just once and expect everything to flow more smoothly after that is established. You
do not have to hire a specialist to manage the project. And it will take less time and
 effort to coordinate, obtain task approvals, and communicate about issues as they
arise, than it would with multiple vendors.
c) Faster entry into the market.​ One team can be faster than several teams for a variety
of reasons. Many teams means more time needed for communication and
coordination. Often one team is on hold while waiting for another team to complete
the tasks necessary for them to start. Such factors can affect the speed of the release.
d) Cost reduction.​ Taking all of the points listed above into account, it is obvious that
single-vendor outsourcing is often a more cost-effective solution. Furthermore, it is
easier to negotiate with just one vendor, and agree on terms, including possible
discount schemes.

BUSINESS SIZE
A business has multiple suppliers and vendors that it comes in contact with, be it a big billion
dollar company or a small start up. Thus size of business that IBM caters to can be divided
into the follow sections -

● Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMBs)

● Large Enterprises

BUSINESS APPLICATION
IBM offers Multi-Vendor services to the following business applications-

INDUSTRY APPLICATION

1. IBM offers Multi-Vendor services to the following industries-

 I. For Energy Companies

CUSTOMERS INCENTIVE TO PURCHASE ​(example of CK Energy)

Energy companies use IBM Multi-Vendor IT support Services platform to centralize
IT support and automate enterprise-wide management of all its IT assets.
Implementing these IBM solutions reduced staffing costs, improved IT support
services and gave management total visibility of its IT infrastructure. It helps to
provide its employees with a single point of contact for IT support and unified IT
asset management across the enterprise.

II. For Hospitals

INDUSTRY SIZE
Healthcare has become one of India’s largest sectors, both in terms of revenue and
employment. The healthcare market can increase three-fold to Rs 8.6 trillion (US$
133.44 billion) by 2022. Indian medical tourism market is growing at 18 per cent
y-o-y and is expected to reach US$ 9 billion by 2020.

CUSTOMERS INCENTIVE TO PURCHASE ​(example of Fortis Hospital)

Hospitals use various hospital information system (HIS) products. These systems
serve as the hospitals’ backbones, providing functions related to patient check-in and
check-out, movement of patients, and billing. The hospitals’ IT infrastructures also
included picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and vendor neutral
archive (VNA) applications to store, present and share images produced by X-ray,
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) scan and ultrasound
machines. Hospitals can engage IBM Technology Support Services – for Multivendor
Support Services (MVS), including facility management services (FMS) and annual
maintenance contract (AMC). Creating a single management point can help simplify
and streamline the way we support hospitals IT infrastructure.”
Today, IBM provides hospitals with dedicated resources who provide
around-the-clock monitoring of critical servers, network equipment, multiprotocol
label switching (MPLS) links, operating systems and business application systems. In
addition to monitoring the health of all of hospitals business-critical equipment, these
resources provide support for basic IT issues. Senior network and server technical
specialists are also on hand to help resolve more complex technical problems as
quickly as possible.
III. For Conglomerate company

INDUSTRY SIZE
Market capital for Godrej Group put together stands somewhere around Rs. 110,602
crores.
Other Conglomerate Companies like Tata, Birla stand at equal market standing with a
large market share.

CUSTOMERS INCENTIVE TO PURCHASE ​(example of Godrej Group)

Conglomerate company’s can partner with IBM to chart a hybrid multi cloud strategy
for the future. IBM implemented a private cloud based on the VMware cloud
foundation and migrated all mission critical applications. IBM manages a multicloud
environment and enables a seamless orchestration of workloads between multiple
clouds. IBM also supports a data backup process and a disaster recovery strategy.
 IBM WATSON IoT PLATFORM
IBM Watson IoT Platform is a managed, cloud-hosted service designed to simplify deriving
value from IoT devices. Watson IoT Platform and its additional add on services like
Blockchain service and analytic service enable organizations to capture and explore data for
devices, equipment, and machines, and discover insights that can drive better
decision-making.

Key Features

a) Capture data in real time​: Process IoT data instantly to help identify valuable
insights related to device behavior and operations in the field. Spot trends before they
impact the bottom line.

b) Optimize operations and resources: ​Reduce operational expense by

understanding your IoT devices to operate them more effectively and efficiently.
Visualize your IoT data to better plan your operations and increase productivity.

c) Increase revenue: ​Use improved business insight and bidirectional communication

with the end user to introduce innovative new products and services.

d) Analytics: ​Enrich, augment and interact with your IoT data from the IoT Platform
with analytics using simplified data ingestion and curation.

IBM is focused on helping their B2B customers manage, operate and design physical assets.
They work with companies in energy and utilities, chemicals and petroleum, aerospace and
defense and a variety of other industries to help solve operational challenges delivered
through interaction with IoT data.

Few of the companies using IBM Watson IoT for IoT Platform include:

a)​ AIRBUS​, a Netherlands based Aerospace and Defense organisation with 136518
employees and revenues of $79.26 billions
b) Le Groupe SNCF, a France based Transportation organisation with 245000 employees and
revenues of $39.00 billions
c) Loreal, a France based Consumer Packaged Goods organisation with 86974 employees and
revenues of $29.87 billions.
d)Mahindra & Mahindra, a India based Professional Services organisation with 42875
employees and revenues of $15.00 billions
e) ​ ​Ferrovial, a Spain based Transportation organisation with 95978 employees and revenues
of $13.71 billions.
BREAKDOWN OF IBM WATSON CUSTOMER SEGMENTS BY INDUSTRY
( 21 VERTICALS)

BREAKDOWN OF IBM WATSON CUSTOMER SEGMENTS BY COUNTRY

 BREAKDOWN OF IBM WATSON IoT BY REVENUE

BREAKDOWN OF IBM WATSON IoT CUSTOMERS BY NUMBER OF

EMPLOYEES
 TARGETING STRATEGY

The IBM Watson IoT team launched their ABM program about a year ago to better
personalize their content by industry and make a greater impact with the companies they aim
to serve. Watson IoT serves a very specific/target set of clients and prospects in ​operational
and manufacturing roles​ within a range of industries. Since the team must reach out to a
finite list of decision makers within these parameters, they created an ABM program with the
goal of targeting roughly 3400 accounts.

The IBM team aligned all their marketing resources towards targeting these accounts. They
participate in paid search and third-party marketing events to maintain an overall industry
presence, but actually spend most of their time and investment in reaching out to the target
accounts.

They know which of their targeted accounts have been on G2 and they follow up with them
accordingly to help them through the purchasing process. G2 is a tech marketplace that
enables businesses to discover, review, and manage marketing technology.
The CEO explained that IBM has always had access to top notch marketing intelligence
information. And now with G2 they can understand not only what their customers are looking
for, but how their customers see IBM Watson IoT solutions compared with other solutions.

G2 provides them with information demonstrating how they rate their products against their
competitors. So that is the information they can share with their Offerings organization, so
they can ultimately make better decisions in the long term. IBM can also share the reviews
with their sellers to help them understand what customers are saying about them.

They started doing this a little less than a year ago for the IoT Watson business and is focused
on targeting individual industries with enough content to speak to industry buyers. They do
this by ensuring their story is not only relevant to the typical target, but to the full buying
group. With more information about specific buying groups the team has been able to better
personalize content by industry, for example, by sending out mailers with industry specific
video that links to a personalized website.

They initially came up with a set of accounts to target, but quickly learned that they needed to
narrow this list down to a smaller and more targeted list. Companies must have agreement
across the entire organization to take on a project like this. The CEO had agreements all the
way from the general manager through to the sellers. He made the decision to put all of
Watson IoT’s paid media behind the ABM program and this has impacted every person in the
organization who is driving demand for their solutions. The former CEO had three major
teams under her, each of which tested a very tactical deep dive approach for a specific
audience.

The IBM CEO says that “It’s a refined approach to targeting that’s allowed us to make a
bigger impact with these companies. We are making our impressions matter from a media
perspective, so we can invest our content marketing dollars to address each audiences’ needs.
This approach is not just helping us decide what we’re going to do, but it’s also helping us
decide what we’re not going to do which is equally important.”