AMA: Quickbase VP of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Segmentation

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 solution to? (get as much detail as possible) * Who else besides you was most involved in deciding whether to use this tool? (title, department, why were they involved)? * How would you describe the value and benefits you realized from the implementation of this tool? * What are the different resources & forums (digital & in-person) you go to learn & network with your peers? Tell me about specific industry events or associations you are part of. * Would you tell me about a specific work-related article that you recently read that was insightful? What was the article, and why was it insightful or relevant to you?

I recommend constantly evaluating the performance by segment (at least quarterly) and doing a segmentation review once a year with annual planning!

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.

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

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.

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 is trying to solve. At the end of the day, segmentation helps you focus your messaging and make it hyper-relevant to them, so focus on the attributes that will help you do that best.

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 templates out there. The best ones are the simple ones that drill down into things like needs, challenges, buying triggers, and behaviors. As part of vertical segments, I also recommend analyzing the tech ecosystem and competitive landscape, there are tools out there that will curate that data for you. This should help you better understand who you’re competing with, and what gaps you can potentially fill. Understanding the tech ecosystem should also help you understand which products might be complimentary to yours, where you can tell a “better together” story, for co-marketing opportunities!

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. 

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 use cases are project management, resource management, process orchestration, etc. That remains true across any segment… but for construction that work might have a different meaning and language compared to healthcare for instance. The way you position this to an SMB will slightly differ from the way you position it to an Enterprise company, but the core problem and use cases you solve for should remain consistent. TLDR; create core use cases and a value prop that remains consistent, and tailor that slightly to each audience.

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.

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. business users).

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. In your case, I’d recommend the same. Go a level higher, categorize your core personas, do most of your work at that level, and then add additional insights per vertical (but don’t recreate personas for each vertical) to make this manageable and easy to scale!

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 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 can weight all of these differently based on what you care about the most and develop a scoring framework that helps you identify your top segments where you win, or scale the best.

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!