Simplifying Market Segmentation

Today I am attending OpenView Venture Partner’s quarterly executive forum on market segmentation. The forum is being delivered by Luke Hohmann, Founder and CEO of Enthiosys and Igor Altman, Senior Associate at OpenView Labs.

Luke is a senior advisor to OpenView Venture Partners and is a recognized expert on agile product management of software products and former senior software product manager at four companies. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on software product management and a frequent speaker at software and other industry events.

Igor is practice development lead of product development and management at OpenView Labs and works closely with Luke and Jeff Sutherland in supporting our portfolio companies in their adoption of Agile product development.

Each quarter, OpenView Venture Partners delivers an executive forum for its portfolio companies and investment prospects to further their knowledge around various functional topics ranging from sales and marketing, organization and operations (finance, legal, IT) to product development. As a Growth Venture Capital fund, we believe the best way to accelerate a portfolio company’s growth is to leverage operational best practices and subject matter experts.

One of the consistent things we hear from our Growth Stage portfolio companies is the importance of market segmentation and its impact on capital efficiency and return. While market segmentation is important, it seems hard…we do it sporadically…and there is lots of misinformation.

The market segmentation forum helps to:

• demystify segmentation
• review a useful segmentation process
• discuss the difficulties on each step
• explore and provide guidance on the difficulties
• develop a plan or produce a result for each step

According to Luke, while there is plenty of research describing what market segmentation is, there is no source that really describes a method for doing it. While Enthiosys is mainly focused on larger technology companies, Luke felt that it was important to establish a relationship with OpenView to leverage his expertise and best practices with Growth Stage companies.