Customer Segmentation: How Successful SaaS Teams Unlock Scale

Not all customers are created equal.

Increasing conversions with the right message to the right person at the right time is a pipe dream for most teams. The problem is that you haven't figured out how to meaningfully segment your customers to do it yet.

We got you.

In this episode of the Forget The Funnel Podcast, Claire and Georgiana deep dive into the de facto segmentation tools that have so many teams tripping over themselves – Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), Personas & Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD).

Walking through real-world examples, we break down when it's mission-critical to get segmentation right; your founder's intuition won't scale, your marketing and messaging are falling flat, and your product-led experiences need to pull their weight - AKA when you need to grow.

Discussed:

• The differences between ICPs, Personas and JBTD - and when to leverage each in your decision-making. 
  
  
• Why founder intuition doesn't scale and how a systematic understanding of customer segments is necessary for scale. 
  
  
• How the promise of 'right message, right person, right time' is achievable and will help you grow more efficiently across marketing, sales and product.  

Key Moments:

1:58 - Claire and Georgiana outline some of the questions that are being asked at the executive-level around the use of customer segmentation tools like personas, ICPs and Jobs-to-be-Done.

3:06 - Georgiana clarifies that no one customer segmentation tool is necessarily better than another; they all have their uses in different contexts. But getting a clear understanding on what these tools mean for your business is key.

5:38 - Claire and Georgiana share their definition of customer segmentation and give a real-world example of what this means in the context of a Forget The Funnel customer, SparkToro. They then break down their definitions of ICP and personas.

9:37 - Georgiana asks Claire to unpack the nuance between the customer research done by teams using personas versus the customer research done using Jobs-to-be-Done.

15:02 - Georgiana unpacks in what situations ICPs are the most useful tool for SaaS product and marketing teams, and when personas make more sense.

18:25 - Claire share one of the main takeaways from the episode - that founder intuition does not scale. You can intuit your way to getting the right person, at the right time, with the right message in the early days, but eventually you hit the point of diminishing returns - where you’ll then need to look at customer segmentation tools to unlock the next stage of growth. Claire shares the example of Attune to illustrate this.

25:55 - The pair finish the episode by talking about the opportunity cost of failing to understand the different segments your product services - even during an economic downturn. 

As always, you can learn more about Forget The Funnel here:

• Read the Forget The Funnel Book
• The AI book companion that comes free with the book 
• Check out Forget the Funnel’s website