December 19, 2023 @ 11:00AM PT
This highly depends on your sales model, but you’ll want to track key sales metrics by segment over time to see how effective your segments are. That could be revenue metrics like pipeline, bookings, ARR, usage metrics, or even win rates per segment. If you’ve segmented your market well, you should start to see each of these metrics rise
I recommend constantly evaluating the performance by segment (at least quarterly) and doing a segmentation review once a year with annual planning!
The product in question is related to energy management and caters to diverse verticals such as agriculture, paper production, and crypto mining. While typically a PMM would craft distinct buyer personas for the purchase journey, handling multiple verticals might result in around 15 personas, which is too much. How do you approach buyer personas in this case? Are personas still essential in this case?
The best way to do this is to create buyer persona categories that remain consistent no matter what vertical you’re speaking to, and then tailor those per vertical. For instance, Quickbase is similar in that we GTM across multiple verticals but we’ve developed 3 core buyer personas: IT buyer, OPs leader, and LOB buyer. We’ve developed personas at that core level, but then we create shorter, tailored documentation per vertical to identify things like specific titles or pain points per industry. I ...Read More
I'm responsible for the healthcare vertical in North America, and there are different kinds of healthcare staffing that have differing needs, requirements, and sometimes use cases.
Here are some questions you can ask: Describe your role in the software purchasing process: are you a budget holder? Decision Maker? Committee Member? Key Influencer? Thinking back to when you started evaluating [one tool named above] what was your role in that process and what was going on that prompted the search for a tool? (get as much detail here as possible – this is the trigger) What problems were you looking to solve with this solution or what use cases were you looking to apply the solu ...Read More
I'm working at a company where we're trying to unlock new industries that we as a company need to have a better understanding of.
I recommend doing a mix of both quantitative and qualitative market research to augment your customer data analysis. For quantitative, you can run market research surveys targeting your core segments to understand needs, buying behaviors, etc. I recommend augmenting that with qualitative interviews of your core buyer personas. You can use different interview panels to find people that fit your core ICP. All of these insights can be used to create buyer personas, there are several different templ ...Read More
What do you recommend just creating a few hypothetical personas initially and adjust/update as you learn of new information, or something else?
For an early-stage startup, I recommend you build your segments based on your top use cases, by identifying your hypothetical ICP and testing it in your GTM efforts. Track key metrics over time and narrow down your top segments based on where you see the most success. The most important thing here is to be clear on the problems you solve (your use cases) and figure out who has that problem, and who is in the market looking for solutions to solve that problem.
Including research (survey interviews), creating of persona documents, and potentially training teams.
I do have a list of consultants for different types of work, including market research! Reach out to me directly and I’d be happy to connect you, depending on what you’re looking for!
This is highly variable and depends on your product. Without knowing the specifics, I’d recommend you analyze your customer data to find patterns and commonalities across them to determine what defines your ideal customer profile. You don’t want to go too broad or too narrow. Most segmentation is a mix of some demographic, psychographic, or behavioral attributes. In my experience, the most effective segments are built around the jobs people are trying to do and the problems this group of people ...Read More
The framework I’ve recently used is based on plotting your company's "ability to win" against TAM, and identifying the segments where you have both the highest ability to win and TAM - because that is where you know you can already win, and there is a huge market so you can focus your GTM efforts most effectively. You can measure the "Ability to Win" using different attributes that matter to your business, some examples are Presence, Win Rates, Annual fees, Retention Rates, YoY Lands, etc. You c ...Read More
Some common mistakes I’ve seen: are being too broad or being too narrow. Not having very accurate data to build on, or focusing segments on short-term wins vs thinking about where there is an ability scale.
Understanding your competitors' segmentation is useful in helping you identify which markets are potentially saturated vs. which are underserved so you can focus your GTM efforts on segments you can potentially own. I usually like to do a competitive intensity review as an additional lens when prioritizing where you want to invest for growth.
There’s no one way of doing this, but in my opinion, your main website messaging should focus on your core value proposition that speaks to your general audience but with paths to specific segment messaging. For instance, most companies create a “solutions” section that contains dedicated landing pages for different audiences, and that usually works well! I’ve also seen instances where you can split your homepage between two core audiences with a toggle button (for instance developers vs. busine ...Read More
This typically comes from a combination of market research, prospect and customer interviews, competitor analysis, or even talking to analysts who have that industry perspective!
The best way to get buy-in is to partner closely with your product team, involve them in every step of the process, and make joint decisions.
Operating to reach SMBs with one product and is scaling upmarket with a new feature targeted to larger enterprises. is it possible to create a value prop that caters to both?
This depends on how different your two offerings are! Ideally, you want a corporate value prop that speaks to the core value of your product portfolio as a whole, and then you want to tailor that for different audiences. One of the best ways of doing that is by being clear on your core use cases and then creating different flavors of your use cases for each of your segments. For instance, Quickbase’s core value prop is our ability to help companies see, connect, and control complex work. Our top ...Read More
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