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Imagine knowing what drives each customer’s buying decisions and how to craft offers that truly resonate. That’s the power of customer segmentation. It transforms guesswork into precise, targeted outreach campaigns. But how do you group your customers, and what are the common customer segmentation models?
While every customer is unique, understanding their shared characteristics and needs is key to unlocking sales magic.
This guide equips your sales team with the know-how to segment your customer base using your CRM. There will be no more guessing—just targeted action, proactive sales, and the sweet taste of success.
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your customers or leads into smaller groups based on shared characteristics.
By segmenting your customers, you’ll understand their needs and preferences better. You can tailor sales strategies and product offerings accordingly, which enhances customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability.
Here is the step-by-step guide on how to do customer segmentation.
What are the goals of segmenting customers? Whether it’s to enhance sales performance, elevate customer service, or optimize marketing campaign outcomes, clarify your objectives.
Retrieve customer data, purchase histories, survey responses, and support ticket information from your CRM system, and consolidate them.
Decide the most suitable type of customer segmentation for your business and customers. Establish key characteristics for each segment and begin organizing your customers accordingly.
There are many ways to segment your customers, and it can vary depending on your industry and the products or services you sell. To help you get started, use the following six customer segments.
Based on shared demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, occupation, education, and income. This segmentation helps in developing targeted sales approaches, product offerings, and pricing strategies.
Use case: Financial consultant (professional services).
Based on physical location, such as countries, regions, neighborhoods, or even zip codes. This allows you to tailor the offerings, marketing, and resource allocation based on specific local needs and trends.
Use case: Construction companies.
Based on the relative value each customer brings, such as profitability, lifetime value, growth potential, and engagement. It helps you allocate resources where they’re needed the most or in the most lucrative areas.
Use case: Manufacturing companies.
Based on the motivations and aspirations of your customers, grouping them based on the problems they seek to solve or the benefits they desire from your products or services.
Use case: Real estate agencies.
Based on the psychological characteristics, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles of your customers—diving deeper than demographics. This approach helps you understand the ‘why’ customers make certain choices.
Use case: Wholesalers and distributors.
Based on their position within their relationship with your company, e.g., acquisition, onboarding, active buyers, renewal, and churn/dormancy.
Use case: Transportation and logistics companies for the ‘churn/dormancy’ segmentation.
The one-size-fits-all sales approach is like a guerrilla tactic, demanding significant sales efforts for minimal satisfactory results. If you aim for an effective and efficient sales workflow, consider segmenting your customers.
Pro tip:
By configuring a custom field within your lead management CRM, you can prompt each sales rep to categorize new leads into their respective groups. Utilizing sophisticated sales CRM software, such as Pipeline CRM, enables you to utilize conditional fields and formatting functionalities, guaranteeing accurate recording of each lead’s data before saving it.
Customer segmentation improves sales efficiency by allowing your sales team to focus efforts on high-value or high-potential customers, deliver personalized messaging, and reduce wasted effort on broad, ineffective outreach. This leads to higher conversion rates and better resource allocation.
Modern CRMs, like Pipeline CRM, let you configure custom fields and conditional formatting to categorize leads automatically. This ensures accurate segment tracking, consistent data entry, and easier targeting for campaigns and outreach.
Customer segmentation improves marketing campaigns by enabling you to create personalized messaging, targeted offers, and relevant content delivery. This leads to higher engagement, better conversion rates, and more efficient use of marketing resources.
