More companies are investing in data and data analytics to increase their revenues. If you're thinking of doing the same, you should know that there's a crucial step that you must include to effectively use this data to improve your revenue.
Database segmentation can help your sales team satisfy your customers' needs by quickly and precisely identifying opportunities, while avoiding any potential challenges before they actually occur.
It gives your team better insight into your customers and can help increase your return on investment (ROI) and improve customer satisfaction.
In this guide, we're going to take you through:
- What is database segmentation
- How to segment for sales
- What to do with your segments
- Using HubSpot for segmentation
- Satisfying your prospects' needs
What Is Database Segmentation?
We should start by saying that database segmentation, or data segmentation, starts with having quality data. Regardless of the method you use to acquire it, your customer data must be continuously updated so that the sales insights you gather are accurate.
Data segmentation is the process of dividing your customer data and organising it into distinct groups or segments. These groups are usually based on characteristics such as age, location, or occupation, as well as behavioural indicators such as buying habits and similar interests.
It's based on the premise that customers with similar characteristics may have the same needs that your product or service can satisfy. You can reach these groups through more effective, targeted marketing efforts.
You can use database marketing segmentation to plan and implement marketing campaigns, but its importance in the sales process is often overlooked.
How to Segment for Sales
Sales personalisation becomes possible with efficient customer relations management (CRM). It allows you to store information about your customers' preferences, purchasing habits, and opinions. Knowing your customers well will help you to recognise their value and improve your interactions with them.
CRM tools will help you to effectively segment your data. Your sales team can record customer data and organise campaigns, by tracking and reviewing every interaction along the sales journey. You can categorise your sales segmentation in the following ways:
By Persona
A buyer persona encompasses the traits and characteristics of what you believe to be your ideal customer. Your business can have multiple personas, most companies have between 3 and 7 in fact. A persona allows you to target activities towards attracting new customers and satisfying their needs.
By Industry
This segments your customers by the industry they're in. This allows you to target the industries you serve by identifying their wants, preferences, and needs. Your sales team can create opportunities and tailored outreaches that are significant to each sector.
By Job Role
This defines your customers by their job roles. It helps to assess their roles in the decision making or buying process so your team will know what type of product or service information would be most valuable or interesting to them. You may need to have some flexibility in titles, however, as sometimes different companies use different titles for the same types of role.
By Buying Cycle
Every customer goes through the buying cycle when they purchase your product or service.
They start with the Awareness Stage, move on to the Consideration Stage, and end at the Decision Stage. During the consideration stage, potential customers evaluate the different alternatives – whether that’s your competitors, or a different way of solving their problem.
If your sales team know what stage of the buying process is relevant to a segment, they can approach with different types of information.
By Pain Point
A customer's pain point is any problem your customer may be experiencing. Customer problems can appear to be unique and varied but once you know what they are, you’ll often find key similarities, and can create a strategy that provides solutions for them.
What to Do with Your Segments
If you have an extensive customer database, there are platforms with specific models that help to segment your database. Having defined customer segments is a major step in the segmentation process but all your hard work will be useless if it isn't used effectively.
Here are a few ways to ensure your data segmentation is successful:
Personalised Outreach
Personalisation goes beyond inserting someone's first name in an email. It's about using the customers' interests you've identified to create relevant and targeted messaging.
Interactions with your prospects should be about building a true connection or relationship. You can achieve this by seeing each of them as an individual. Target your content to each segment and refresh it every time you update your database, based on their behaviours and preferences.
Personalised video is a great way to do this. Companies such as Vidyard leverage technology to create personalised video content based on a customer's name, job title, company, etc. Your prospect will feel that you created the message specifically for them.
Video outreach helps to build relationships, increases engagement, and results in higher open and clickthrough rates. It is a wonderful way to get your audience’s attention and keep it.
Special Offers
You can use data segmentation to provide special offers to your customers or prospects. These promotions will feel personal or specific to them. They will feel like you 'know' them - their tastes, their habits, and their preferences.
Your database segmentation strategy will allow you to:
- Define and set goals for your segmented promotion
- Review your key performance indicators (KPIs) to see if you've met your goals
- Identify subsegments to create different promotions
- Create offers geared toward these subsegments
Your customers will appreciate personalised offers as they're based on their past purchase habits. They'll feel a level of trust and loyalty toward your brand because you made an effort to satisfy their needs.
This will allow you to build on existing data as loyal customers are more likely to share additional information which will enable you to provide an even more personalised experience for them.
Tailored Content
Your content will be well-received if tailored to each person via a medium they are most comfortable with. Your messaging should be relevant to the stage of the customer journey. This will help you to build a long-lasting relationship with them.
Let your content meet them on their journey, hold their hand, and guide them to your product or service that will ultimately satisfy their need or solve their problem. Get to know your customers and prospects and use these insights to strengthen your relationships with them.
Using HubSpot for Segmentation
HubSpot's platform allows you to easily build your segmentation strategy, using lists to segment your customers.
Here are a few of the features that can assist you with your data segmentation:
Custom Properties
HubSpot's custom properties allow you to add additional information about your customers in your CRM. Once created, it will be available for each of your records. These properties can include data that is unique to your business needs, such as the number of branches of a business owned by a franchisee, the type of IT they use, or even their shoe size.
It allows you to customise your unique data field using:
- Field Type
- Number Properties
- Dropdowns
- Checkboxes
- Date Properties
- HubSpot User Properties
It also allows other field types such as multi-line text and radio selection. Their search filter tricks allow you to find data quickly, even with limited information.
Using Views and Lists
You can create lists of contacts or companies in HubSpot based on property values and other characteristics. HubSpot has two types of lists:
- Active - Records are automatically updated based on the list's criteria. Any records that meet the criteria are added to the list, while those that no longer do are removed.
- Static - Records need to be manually added or removed. They do not update automatically and new records that meet the criteria are not added. Static lists reflect contacts that meet specific criteria at the time the list is saved.
You can also view the performance of a contact list to analyse its metrics including list size, engagement, breakdown, and activity.
Using Automation to Streamline Your Activity
HubSpot's CRM is free and can organise and track your customers and nurture leads. You can link it to the other software and tools you currently use.
It can assist in streamlining sales activities and improving performance. Your sales reps can use it to:
- Prospect
- Enhance leads
- Create contacts and deals
- Customise email templates
- Automate sales emails
- Schedule meetings
- Transcribe and analyse sales calls
- Automate deal management
- Have proposals created automatically
Your sales managers can use HubSpot’s Sales Hub to create reports that they would normally compile and email to their reps daily. HubSpot can automatically compile and send these reports out.
It can also effectively score leads and equitably rotate them among your sales team. This gives everyone a fair chance to increase sales, which is especially important if they have a monthly quota to meet.
HubSpot automates most of the work that was once manually done and time-consuming. It frees up your sales managers and reps so that they can focus on what's important generating more business and delighting your customers.
Satisfying Your Prospects' Needs
Don't be afraid to explore and exploit your database. It is the key to enhancing your marketing productivity and increasing sales. Database segmentation also helps to improve lead generation and is an ideal way to learn about your prospects.
Do you have any questions about data segmentation? We are a platinum HubSpot partner agency in Bristol and ready to help your business utilise data segmentation with HubSpot to improve your sales and marketing productivity.
