Your Complete Guide to Customer Segmentation

Identifying your best customers to maximize lifetime value

Step 1 of segmentation: Cater your outfit to the customer’s industry profile

The Goal of Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing up your customers based on shared characteristics, with the goal of building a sales process that caters to their needs.

Customer variables may include:

• Budget

  • How much can they realistically spend?

• Decision maker

  • Who signs the check?

• Procurement maturity

  • Will there be a formal RFP (request for proposal) process?

• Sales timeline

  • What’s the estimated time from start to finish

• Pain points

  • What technical solutions are important

Based on these inputs, segmentation allows you to meet your customers where they’d like to transact, with the right messaging and a pricing structure that makes sense.

Segmentation is crucial from a sales staffing perspective - selling to different customer types takes various process based skillsets. And from a marketing approach, you won’t find all leads in the same place, through the same channels, or for the same customer acquisition cost.

It’s an iterative journey, filled with both art and science. Here’s what we’ll cover to get you there:

1. The Output and Goal

2. Early On

3. Who’s Involved in Customer Segmentation

4. Customer Characteristics

5. Starting with Employee Count

6. Beyond Employee Count: Other Segmentation Criteria

7. What Not to Segment By

8. The Impact of Procurement Maturity

9. The MAP Model of Segmentation

10. Sales Rollout

11. Determining Lead Source

12. Avoiding Pitfalls

Let’s jump in.