120 Segmentation Ideas for Advanced B2B Marketers (2019)
20th Jun 2017You need to stop, generic "send to all" broadcasts messages, and start talking to your leads and customers in the way that matters to them.
... you've probably heard that sort of advice before, but sometime's it's difficult to know *what* to say or how to split up your list in a meaningful way.120 Segmentation Methods for Advanced B2B Marketers
Whether you're an SDR looking to personalize sales outreach, a marketer targeting ads, or a customer success manager trying to find another way to build rapport with your clients - sometimes, you just need a long list of segmentation methods, examples and ideas.
That is this, but it comes with a caveat.
Nothing compare to a complete segmentation strategy
First, you need to define your ideal customer profile - what attributes and actions best describe the people and companies who make up your best buyers?
With your ICP, you need to find sources of data so you can segment your leads and customers in the way that’s best for your business.
Want to get started fast? Grab our segmentation cheatsheet!
But even then, are you missing opportunities to reach the right people with the right message? Could you be closing more customers?
Think of B2B segmentation by accounts, profiles and actions.
To this end, here’s 120 segmentation methods for B2B. These are split up into three broad categories:
- Account profiles - the “firmographics” behind what the company is
- Person profiles - data about a person
- Person actions - data about what a person has done.
Account Profiles
This is the "firmographic data" about each company. Common sources include form fills to your marketing automation tools, sales notes into your CRM, and third party data enrichment sources.
Account Value
What determines a high (or low?) value account for you?
- Account spend / subscription value
- Number of seats
- Usage trends (upwards/downwards)
- “Aha” moment reached
- Account expiration
- Account under review
- Serviceable country
Location and Contact
Where is the company located?
- City
- Country
- Region
- Address
- Phone number
- Timezone
- Language
Classification & Competition
How can you classify the company?
- Industry (including NAICS / SIC codes for the United States)
- Organization type (non-profit, public, private etc.)
- Competitors
- Technologies used
Size and Age
What are other ways of measuring a company
- Revenue
- Raised (investment or debt)
- Year founded
Influence
How much influence does the company have?
- Alexa rank (website traffic rank)
- Number of Twitter followers
- Number of LinkedIn company followers
Person Profiles
This is data about the individuals who work at these companies. Common sources include form fills to your marketing automation tools and backend databases (for products), your CRM, and third party data enrichment tools.
Job
What is their job?
- Job role (e.g. sales)
- Job title (e.g. Director of Sales)
- Seniority (e.g. VP / Director / Manager)
- Agency / in-house / Freelancer
Interests
What interests can you lean on, that are related to your business, or not? Can you deliver a unique value proposition?
"February weather suck in Idaho? Come to our sunny San Diego conference!"
- LinkedIn bio keywords
- Twitter bio keywords
- Follows influencer
- Follows topics
- GitHub profile (as “technical” person)
- Quiz score
- Weather (locally, immediately)
- Weather (regionally, seasonally)
- NPS response
- Political leaning
- Myers-Briggs profile
- Subscription preferences (topic and frequency)
- Subscription reason (opt-in content or webinar attended)
- Recent awards / mentions / news
- Education level
- Education background
Lifecycle Status
How far along your customer lifecycle are they?
- Churn score
- Lead score
- Lifecycle status
- Onboarded (aggregate of actions)
- Marked for case study
- Weekly active user
- Qualified lead
- Person under review
- Subscriber rating
- “VIP” list (mark significant contacts in your database)
Influence and Commonality
Target people by their influence. Try to make people feel special by noticing something in common.
- Birthday / Age
- Gender
- Number of twitter followers
- Mutual contacts (matchup by personally known contacts)
- Is Gmail contact
- Is Twitter follower
- Is Facebook friend
- Is LinkedIn connection
- Previous employer(s)
- Associated contacts
- Last blog post
- Last tweet
- Last instagram photo
Location and Contact
For geographic semgnetation. Where are they located, and how can you contact them?
- Freemail address (e.g. gmail)
- Business email
- Business credit card
- City
- Country
- Region
- Achievements
- Phone number
- Subscribed
- Timezone
- Language
Person Actions (for behavioral segmentation)
The third category - what has the person done? Common sources for this sit in your analytics tools (for website and product actions), backend databases (for product actions), as well as within other tools for sending and measuring engagement like email and marketing automation.
Milestones and Limits
What key actions a person has taken, and what should their next steps be?
- Account created
- Profile created
- Demo requested
- Logged in
- Billing / pricing page viewed
- Trial limits page viewed
- Turned on team/collaborative feature
- Installed
- Cancelled subscription
- Submitted survey
- Abandoned form
- Abandoned search
- Abandoned purchase
- Attended an event
- Trial / accounts limits hit
Recency and Frequency
What is their level of interest and intent.
- Number of website visits in the past week
- Number of email opens in the past week
- Last purchase
- Last action
- Last visited
- Last email sent
- Last email opened seen
- Last email clicked
- Last email replied
- Last active (aggregated)
Preferences
Best for refining when and how you reach out to people.
- Mobile vs. desktop preference
- Browser preference
- Email client
- Open rate
- Time of email opens
- Time of email replies
- Time of email clicks
- Source and Medium
- Campaign
Keywords
Great for building interest-based segments of “contains”
- Page view keywords
- Search keywords
- Category tags
X, but not Y
This is powerful for triggering email nurture campaigns and sales activities at the right time.
- Trial but not converted
- Viewed pricing page but not requested a demo
- Named project something high value
- First time, but not repeat purchase
- Purchased but haven’t reviewed
Bewildered by the different options? Don’t be.
Segmentation should be strategic, not a random list. Whilst this list of segmentation ideas might fire up your brain, you need to carefully consider how you’ll build the segments that will drive the most value for your business.
→ Read Next: Secrets of Segmentatation (with free summary cheatsheet)

Prev 'Ed of Growth at Hull, working on all things content, acquisition & conversion. Conference speaker, flight hacker, prev. employee #1 at inbound.org (acq. HubSpot). Now at Behind The Growth
If you've questions or ideas, I'd love to geek out together on Twitter or LinkedIn. 👇