Know your customers I: Segmentation

This article kicks off a new series of marketing and sales tips. Subscribe to our blog or Twitter feed to receive future installments.

I earlier wrote about the Revenue Typhoon where the secret to generating revenues is creating an end-to-end integrated marketing and sales process. This Know Your Customers series will show how that happens.

The more you know about your contacts, prospects, and customers, the better you can tailor your messaging, communications, and products to increase sales. One technique is segmentation. There are many ways types of segments. The key is finding the ones that naturally divide your prospects by person and company and enable more targeted one-to-one marketing.

Typical B2B segments include:

• Location
• Industry
• Market
• Professional
• Organizational title

Segmentation is developed at the beginning of marketing and sales planning where your Market definition describes a target customer. If you don’t have a formal marketing plan, take your best shot and define one. Then look to your actual customers. You may find reality different from your original customer notions. If they diverge, update your target customer profile to match who actually is buying your product.

Tool tip – use WeMeUs Contact Management and Lead Generation.  Learn more about WeMeUs tag and group management so you can store segmentation data on your leads and customers.

You’re not AT&T & I’m not Obama

News the past few weeks from the private and public sectors share a common theme. On the industry side, in my blog I wrote “The only technology sector where prices go up …” about AT&T and the other telcos still playing the old monopoly shell game. Whether it’s a fake price war or shoddy service, that kind of manipulation of brand, press, and market is fading into the past as communications is increasingly immediate and universal.

In the public sphere the Democrats shockingly lost Ted Kennedy’s seat. In the short space of a year, a President and a party that soared through the polls have been slapped back down to Earth. The swing electorate swung back. The people were speaking and those that did not hear suffered the consequences.

Business today is transparent and real-time. The information revolution has brought down entire industries from recorded music to print advertising. Even Google is throwing in the towel and adding Twitter and other live feeds into its search results. Markets, customers, and voters are fully empowered.

When billion dollar companies and popular Presidents are dissected and gutted, what chance do YOU have?

What does this mean for your business? What products or services are threatened? What new opportunities does it create? How do you develop a meaningful and genuine dialog with your market? Should you even be in that conversation?

These issues, both strategic and tactical, are ones that we can help you with, whether it’s one-on-one consulting or Tribe Blue for your small business or large company.