One of the keys to scaling effectively at the expansion stage is using customer segmentation to identify your best current customer segments so that you can sell to them more often and more efficiently.
Of the many challenges that startup B2B technology companies face, replicating prior success in a scalable and predictable manner can be especially troublesome. That’s because many of these companies tend to generate a disproportionate amount of their sales from a relatively small number of customers. Through customer segmentation, however, companies can identify other prospects who are most similar to their best current customers, paving the way for additional sales growth.
Finding Your Best Customer: A Guide to Best Current B2B Customer Segmentation outlines a research process that expansion-stage technology companies can use to find their best current customer segment, identifying and verifying hypotheses about the characteristics of a company’s best customers using a variety of data. Those verified hypotheses can then be synthesized into specific customer segments based on those characteristics, allowing the best customer segments to be identified and detailed.
While this customer segmentation eBook provides a step-by-step process for identifying, prioritizing, and targeting your best current customer segments, simply following the customer segmentation process it lays out does not guarantee success. To be effective, companies must prepare and plan for the various challenges and hurdles that each step may present, always making sure to adapt their process to any new information or feedback that might change its output. Importantly, companies cannot force-feed this process. If the key stakeholders who will be impacted by the best current customer segmentation process do not fully buy into it, then the outputs produced from it will be relatively meaningless.
If you properly manage the best current customer segmentation process, however, the impact it can have on every part of your organization — sales, marketing, product development, customer service, etc. — is immense. Your business will possess stronger customer focus and market clarity, allowing it to scale in a far more predictable and efficient manner.
Ultimately, that means no longer needing to take on every customer that is willing to pay for your product or service, which will allow you to instead hone in on a specific subset of customers that present the most profitable opportunities and efficient use of resources. That is critical for every business, of course, but at the expansion stage, it can often be the difference between incredible success and certain failure.