10 use cases for Productboard’s dynamic customer segmentation
Zero in on your target segments’ needs, faster
With Productboard’s dynamic customer segmentation and Salesforce integration, product managers finally have a quick and seamless way to understand customer needs and strategically segment using customer feedback and CRM data. Product teams can use segmentation to quickly prioritize strategic features for key customers, making better-informed prioritization decisions with higher confidence.
To get you started on a deeper understanding of customer needs, we’ve outlined 10 (of the many) use cases for dynamic customer segmentation. We can’t wait to see what segments you create and needs you discover!
1. Retain existing customers
Product teams create excellent products by identifying and validating customer pain points using feedback instead of assumptions. According to Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, “No matter where you’re at as a company, focusing on your customers is the right path.” Plus, it’s much cheaper to retain your current customers than acquire new customers to replace them.
With Productboard’s dynamic customer segmentation, you can segment out the needs of customers from prospects. You can use customers’ feedback to uncover their most pressing problems and test and validate solutions before jumping straight into delivering them. Discover and prioritize the features your customers need, like enhanced security, instead of features like a Jira integration, which may only be a high priority for prospects. By doing so, you can better ensure that your customers are happy, loyal, and ready for expansion opportunities.
2. Address the needs of customers at risk of churn
With dynamic customer segmentation, you can capture customer churn metrics into Productboard from your CRMs. By creating a high churn risk customer segment with the relevant feedback, you can target building features essential to reduce churn. For example, your less engaged customers may desire a Miro integration and advanced permissions, two features you can prioritize to retain your customers.
3. Identify features high-revenue customers need
If you were to lose 50 customers who each pay you $3,000 per year, you’d lose $150k in revenue. If you were to lose the same number of customers who each pay you over $500k, you’d lose $25m in revenue. Creating a segment for companies with ARR > $500k allows you to understand your highest-paying customers’ needs. For example, you may determine this segment needs multiple workspaces and advanced collaboration. Then it’s essential to prioritize these features for your company’s growth and scale.
Segmentation provides your leadership with impactful, data-driven prioritization. When customer-facing teams, like sales and customer success, ask why you prioritized this feature, you can show the monetary value (existing ARR of all companies who requested it) attached to the feature to build consensus and priority alignment.
4. Identify features to attract prospects
It’s critical to grow your customer base by targeting prospects to scale your company and increase your market share. Since prospects and existing customers often have very different needs, it’s crucial to separate their needs. With segmentation, determine the needs your products haven’t addressed that prevent prospects from converting or hinder your ability to attract new ones.
For example, as you expand, prospects may request advanced reporting, a Slack integration, new industry-related features, or even additional privacy requirements. Yet these features aren’t deal breakers for your existing customers and their needs. You can even group prospects by which competitors they use or are evaluating. Plus, see feature request trends that can guide your product strategy and prioritization to outpace competitors through these segments.
“We have target customers we want to sell to in the future, so we’re most interested in the feedback from these types of companies. In just a few seconds, we see their needs with Productboard’s incredibly flexible, powerful, and easy to use segment creation experience. Our stakeholders and leadership need to know that we’re focusing on customers that matter and dynamic customer segmentation enables us to easily show them.”
5. Address the needs of companies in a target business segment
Customers and prospects come in all sizes, from SMB to mid-market to enterprise. While your company may have customers in many of these segments, you have a core target market segment you’re seeking to sell or expand in. For example, senior leadership may prioritize the enterprise segment to increase your market size, leverage larger budgets for higher Annual Contract Values (ACVs), and reduce churn.
It’s necessary to use a data-driven approach like dynamic customer segmentation to target a segment strategically. Easily avoid mixing your smaller customers’ needs with enterprise needs. By creating an enterprise segment in Productboard, you can move upmarket, by focusing only on enterprise feedback and needs. Productboard uses an auto-calculated score to seamlessly surface your customers’ most pressing needs and guide your prioritization efforts.
6. Address the needs of companies in a specific industry
While you may have customers in all industries, you’ll often achieve product-market fit in specific verticals. As your company or product offerings mature, you may target customer growth from a new sector or receive substantial interest from prospects in a new vertical. Yet, customers in different industries have unique needs. For example, if you’re targeting customers in financial services, specifically accounting, and you don’t have a Quickbooks integration, it can be difficult or even impossible to sell to these customers.
If you’re looking to enter a highly regulated market like healthcare, you’ll likely encounter specific privacy and compliance requirements. By creating target industry segments, you can see the top features requested based on only those customers’ feedback. You may need to reprioritize your product roadmap if you discover it lacks features addressing customer needs specific to that industry.
7. Identify needs from your most essential feedback sources
These days, product organizations receive and capture endless amounts of feedback from diverse touchpoints, but not all feedback is created equal. You may have internal feedback from product leaders and GTM teams, and external feedback from customers, prospects, or even service providers shared via Slack or support tickets.
To determine potential churn risk and inform your product strategy, you may want to prioritize a segment with support tickets reporting product issues or improvements, rather than prioritizing a segment of existing customers who are overall happy with your product. You can also create segments to understand how feedback and feature requests differ from NPS surveys, lost prospects during the sales cycle, top win-loss reasons, or churn reasons from customer success. You can even differentiate between your service providers’ needs. They may request industry or segment-specific features for their customers that you’re not currently targeting.
8. Identify features for companies in a target geography
When expanding your product to new geographies, locations have different language, privacy, or compliance requirements, critical for product adoption. These feature requests align with diverse customer habits, routines, and preferences. By creating geographic segments by region, or more granularly by country, you can prioritize features for individual target markets or features needed in multiple markets, such as Spanish translation. Aligning these segments to your business strategy, you can prioritize features for the regions most critical for your company’s success.
Segmentation can also help you identify specific overlapping needs of geographies where most of your customers are based. If one region with a large customer base, such as EMEA, wants a particular feature, you can prioritize it, as the ROI to build it is likely higher than other investments. You may also want to create geographic customer segments to segment the amount of feedback you receive. If you notice more support tickets from your European customers, this can help you identify areas of improvement in your product enablement and onboarding.
9. Create segment-centered roadmaps for critical segments
If you need to show your leadership or a specific customer-facing team what features you’ve planned for a particular segment, you can build a segment-centered roadmap. For example, you can use an enterprise-centered roadmap to show your executives, enterprise sales team, and even enterprise customers and prospects upcoming features that meet their needs.
10. Achieve product-market fit for your startup
Segmenting your customer discovery process is critical to discovering product-market fit. By creating customer segments, such as industry or target business segments, you can identify segments whose needs match your product or prioritize different use cases gaining traction. You can then move your product and the features you build towards this segment to achieve product-market fit.
Remember that learning and growth doesn’t just stop when your company achieves product-market fit. According to product thought leader Marty Cagan, in order to achieve your product vision, or “the future you’re trying to create”, you must improve and expand your product post product-market fit.
“Productboard’s flexible segmentation feature will be a great tool to improve our product-market fit over time.”
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