Segmenting your Customers

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of segmenting your customers. It is one of the most important pieces of information for the sales team and the company. By staying diligent, it will allow your sales and marketing teams the ability to do very focused marketing. It also makes sure you are staying focused on your core customer base as well as spot new types of customers.

Segmentation options should be centrally maintained to ensure consistency. To make it easy for reps and marketing it should be a pick list to choose from when entering or editing a new customer or company record. Below is an example of how it would work. Most CRM solutions allow for some level of segmentation. However, company policy drives it.

Once entered, doing mailings and events to specific segments are easy. But you also get to see pipelines and forecasts in terms of your segments. This allows the sales team and management to be more proactive based on certain tends you are seeing in specific segments.

As I mentioned while most CRM solutions will support this field it takes a strong company policy to ensure people are properly entering it. Making it a required field when creating or editing a customer record will help.

Segment Pick List Example

Double click to enlarge

Tags: crm, CRM Basics