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.