Understanding Segments

What Is Segmentation?

Market segmentation is the art and science of identifying sections of your market based on similar characteristics, so that you can more successfully identify, attract, engage, convert, close, and upsell. The better you get at defining the different ways that people and accounts are interested in your products or services, the better your business outcomes will be.

For example, if you're selling software, you might have a list of all prospective customers. Within that list, you may have executives who are interested in the return on investment, end-users who are interested in ease of use, and administrators interested in how well you support set up. Identifying these groups enables you to engage with visitors to your site in ways that address their interests, not a general message about how great your software is and not a detailed list including advantages that are irrelevant to them. It allows you to fine-tune your message to directly engage each prospective customer by addressing their real needs.

Segments Create a Field

When you create a segment, the result is a field that you can use to identify data by the segment you defined, such as Industry or Region. A segment is a field appended to your data that allows you to filter on the groups that you defined. You can append the segment to your data:

• As a custom field for accounts, people, opportunities, or activities.
• As a roll-up of data across all sources, such as Demandbase Intent, firmographics, and so forth.
• As a custom field to push to CRM. See Map Segments to CRM Custom Fields.

See:

• Understanding Fields
• Understanding the Difference between Account Lists and Segments
• Create Segments

What Makes Demandbase Segments Different?

Account, People, Opportunity, and Activity segments: While other systems may look at account, opportunity, or activity data, they can only segment people. Demandbase’s Segments return groups of people, accounts, activities, or opportunities. These additional segmentations provide a very powerful way for you to not only know who at what companies to identify, attract, and engage, but also what activities and opportunities they may participate in.

Selectors and Copious Data: In Demandbase One, we define these groups with Selectors, which have access to Demandbase's copious amounts of demographic, firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data across multiple data sources.

How Segments and Groups Work

In Demandbase, we create Segments by first identifying the type of segment and then the specific groups that we want the person, account, activity, or opportunity to be in, within that segment. For example, we might create a segment called Industry with these groups: Automotive, Construction, Banking, Education, and Energy. Demandbase adds a field to each person, account, activity, or opportunity, and, using Selectors, identifies which industry each is in.

Some other examples of segments include: company size, geography, and product target. You could also segment by customer stage and create groups such as prospects on your target account list, lost prospects, former customers, or key competitors.

Priority-level is another useful segment that deserves some explanation. Even though you're focusing on higher priority accounts in ABM, within those accounts there are still relative high, low, and medium priority, especially as a precursor to taking action. Higher priority should be relatively small and represent higher potential value to your company that warrant a higher share of resources. For priority level, Priority Level would be the segment and High, Low, and Medium would be the groups within the segments.

Groups within segments are mutually exclusive, meaning that a person, account, opportunity, or activity can only be a member of one group within a segment. A person, account, opportunity, or activity belongs to the first group that you create that it qualifies for within the group. They will not be placed in subsequent groups that you create, even if they qualify.

People, accounts, opportunities, or activities that don't qualify for any of the segments you create remain within a default group. For example, a Job Title segment might include only two groups: CXOs and Administrators. If everyone else in the company is an end-user, they would remain in the default group, Other. Defining the group is a best practice, so you can have more control over their criteria.

Use Cases

Segments can be used to help you in various situations, such as:

• Getting insight into what type of activities your accounts are engaging in. See Understanding Multiple Predictive Scores.
• Showing your sales team what activities marketing is doing on their behalf. 
• Understanding if you are deepening relationships and creating demand with the right people at the right accounts.