Question

Topic: Strategy

Client Segmentation Criteria

Posted by Anonymous on 6/21/2004 at 6:02 PM ET 125 Points
Hw to establish various criteras for a good client database segmentation, in order to be able to go after the better ones
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  • Posted by telemoxie on 6/21/2004 at 8:08 PM Member
    Since you haven't told us much about your company or target market, I'm assuming you are targeting corporations. If you are targeting consumers, you need a B2C expert - please ignore the remainder of this email.

    By the way, if you post more info about your company and offering, you will probably get much more helpful information from this forum.

    Are you truly talking about "clients" or are you talking about "prospects" ?

    As a practial matter, if you are trying to build a top prospect list, I think you need to segment by data elements which you can later use to build a list, e.g. SIC code (sometimes NAICS code), # employees, Heaquarters or Branch, maybe # years in business, annual revenues, title of contact person... You can select ten or twenty firms you believe to be top prospects, look them up on ZAPDATA or ReferenceUSA or something, get their demographics, and use this to build a list.

    Another way to build a smaller but potentially more targeted top prospect would be to make a list of 4 or 5 excellent target companies, and then do a Google search on a combination of names. For example, if you wanted to sell to Golf Ball Manufacturers, and you searched for +"Company name one" +"company name two" - you would be returned with a list of sites referencing both companies - and sometimes these are excellent target lists. You will then need to look up contact details and demographics (visit your local business library - it's amazing what is available online).
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 6/22/2004 at 2:33 PM Accepted
    Some categories you could segment by:

    What the customer looks like:
    - company size (sales dollars, employees, etc.)
    - vertical

    How customers work with you:
    - total sales per customer (break into categories of dollar ranges)
    - how often they buy (using this category with the last, you can see if a customer places many small orders, few large orders, etc.).
    - when their last order was (are they stopping orders from you)
    - some form of profitability of the orders they place (margin is probably the easiest to find)
    - sales channel used

    You need to choose which of these (and others which I didn't think of) you can get info on and then try to describe groups of customers (segments). Then using these segments, determine how best to go after them (or even if they are worth going after them).
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