To truly understand your ideal customer, go beyond assumptions like “Company A has been loyal” or “Company B loves our product.” Start with your technology stack — CRM, ERP, and financial systems — to gain a holistic view of your market. Real, impactful segmentation involves diving deep into customer behaviors and financial metrics. Even if some data points are missing, use creative approaches to quantify qualitative insights. This way, you make decisions with confidence, guided by comprehensive, data-driven understanding.
It’s important to differentiate between market segmentation and price segmentation. Market segmentation focuses on finding large customer segments that share similar behaviors. Price segmentation is about determining who within the market segment is willing to pay (WTP) and how much. With data as your guide, you’ll discover which customers fully utilize your offering, which are profitable, and which aren’t. Without developing customer, marketing, and price segmentation, you’re making decisions without full knowledge. Data-driven decision-making, shown in our work with [client name; link to case study on customer segmentation], provides a level of confidence and reassurance that traditional methods can’t match.
After identifying your market and ideal customer profiles, turn your attention to your CRM. Updating your CRM is not a one-time activity but an ongoing process. Enrich the system with new data objects that rank customers based on your ideal profiles, allowing your sales and marketing teams to target high-value accounts more effectively. Use insights from your segmentation analysis to prioritize and strategize outreach efforts. To add more firepower to your CRM, consider integrating data enrichment tools like ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Clearbit, which can provide critical data points that drive smarter targeting.
With clear segmentation and CRM updates in place, the next step is to align customer needs with your growth strategy through account mapping. Not all customers or revenue streams are created equal; overlay a product segmentation on top of your revised customer segmentation to understand which combinations yield the most growth. A good start for your account mapping variables is customer scoring, product scoring, territory, family, and line-item revenue and profit, then integrate these variables into your CRM. If you’re using Salesforce Enterprise CRM, you can leverage Altify for strategic account planning.
To achieve true customer intimacy, how you communicate your brand value is key. Translate your brand strategy into a clear, compelling messaging framework tailored to specific personas and customer segments. This approach lays the groundwork for effective account-based marketing (ABM). It sets you up to deliver on your brand promise [link to case study on brand strategy to persona to activation to ABM - Qualcomm].
As you develop your messaging, consider where customers are in their journey with you, categorized by the Customer Experience Lifecycle (CXL). Prioritize your outreach based on the new customer scoring models, ensuring you speak directly to the needs and pain points of each segment. To deliver on customer intimacy, look beyond your existing marketing toolbox. Enhance your communications through innovative tools like video marketing (Vidyard, Wistia) and conversational marketing via chatbots (Drift, Intercom) to engage customers in dynamic ways and enhance their experiences with your brand.
Your key performance indicators (KPIs) should evolve alongside your data-driven ABM strategy. At TopRight, most of our reporting is from HubSpot’s existing library of pre-generated reports. For your updated dashboards, target accounts by activity, sales rep, marketing, product/service usage, and customer scoring. Leveraging tools like Domo, Tableau, and Microsoft BI can offer richer, more actionable insights. Additionally, consider adding specialized ABM platforms such as Terminus, 6Sense, or PathFactory to your tech stack for a more granular approach to measuring success across the CXL.
CX and ABM strategies aren’t just nice-to-have — they’re essential for driving sustainable growth. The success of your strategy hinges on aligning internally and communicating consistently externally.
Questions to Answer
- What does our brand stand for?
- What unique value do we offer our customers?
- How are we leveraging data to understand and engage our customers?
- How do we measure the success of our ideal customer profiles?
By integrating data into every aspect of your strategy — marketing, decision-making, and sales — you’ll build stronger, more meaningful relationships with the right customers, positioning your business for lasting success.
