I'm Hubert Palan, Co-founder and CEO of Productboard. AMA! đź‘‹

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Hi Akhilesh, take a look at my earlier response to Krish about segmentation. That is the foundation of it. so the key three questions are:

  1. Customers - Who are the people that will become your customers?
  2. Needs - What needs/problems are you going to solve for them?
  3. Products - What products or services are you going to offer to satisfy their needs?

I know it sounds obvious, but segmenting customers and your go-to-market motion, based on the data that you get from clearbit or other data enrichment sources is just a proxy that is likely not the best one. You need to have a much more nuance understanding.

Here is a snippet from my work in progress book on Product Strategy where I use Salesforce as an example:

Salesforce has different types of customer segments that differ on many dimensions. For example:

  • Company size - Very Small businesses, Small Medium Businesses, Mid-market business, and Large Enteprises.
  • Industry
  • Georgraphy
  • etc.

They also likely differ along a less-easy-to-identify set of dimensions like:

  • Willingness to pay
  • Technology adoption
  • Security vigilance
  • etc.

Further though, within each of the companies there are different personas that differ for each of the different markets Salesforce serves. For example just within the Sales/CRM market we can identify distinct personas:

  • Individual Sales Reps
  • Sales Managers
  • CRO/VP Sales/Sales leadership
  • Sales operations
  • Other non-sales users
  • etc.

And to complicate things even further, there are also other personas that might interact with the company and its CRM system:

  • Suppliers
  • Partners
  • Customers
  • etc.

Customers can be described by a combination of descriptive and behavioral characteristics.

Descriptive characteristics are typically demographics that are available externally. Think information on a LinkedIn or Facebook profile of an individual or a company or information available from a marketing data provider like Dun & Bradstreet. For individuals it can be title, location, education, years of experience, family status, income, etc. For a company it can be number of employees, funding, revenue, industry, technology stack, etc.

Behavioral characteristics are a set of behaviors that a specific set of customers exhibit - knowledge of topics, likes and dislikes of specific products, response to a specific product, service, or a promotion, purchasing behavior, etc. They are additional characteristics that can help you identify the right set of customers even more precisely.

You want to understand the characteristics of your customers as closely as possible because you need to be able to target them as precisely as possible. The more you understand who they are the more personalized and targeted your messaging and campaigns can be and the more focused can your product efforts be to make sure that you satisfy really well the needs of your chosen target customer segment.

For example if you were to start a new CRM company that will one day take on Mark Benioff’s Salesforce, you might want to initially focus on a set of sales needs of a narrow target segment where you can be highly differentiated:

  • Individual sales reps (persona),
  • at Small & Medium-sized businesses, in the online retail industry, in the USA (descriptive characteristics),
  • who are technically savvy, but dissatisfied with existing, complex, difficult to use CRM systems like Salesforce (behavioral characteristics).
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