"Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Billseng — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 18:46:45 GMT

Hi-

I'm seeking advice on how best to define one or more "company types", and then combine those with a buyer persona.

For background, my company sells helicopter parts for Robinson Helicopters. 95% of our customers are commercial/government entities, but we need a more granular way to segment them.

For example, some of our commercial customers are flight schools. Some are tour operators. Some support agriculture operations. Some are supporting commercial fishing operations. Some are supporting game management. Some are focused on security for high-value ground transportation (like an armored car loaded with cash, or a prominent politician/celebrity). Some do powerline or pipeline inspections. There are also a few who span one or more of these - think of them like contractors who might do one type of job for a week or two, and then

Our government customers include police, fire, and first responders. That broad segment also includes military flight schools, as well as university flight schools.

Next we have resellers. This group includes "part sourcers" who source parts from multiple sellers to get the best overall prices for their clients. This group also includes Robinson Helicopter Service Centers who repair and maintain their own fleets as well as some 3rd party clients.

Lastly, we have Private Owner/Operators who use their helicopters for recreation or personal transportation. They make up about 5% of our total business.

Within each of these companies/institutions/private owners, we have different personas that do the buying - like a maintainer, whose job is to keep the fleet operational and flying. Or an office manager or head of operations might be the actual purchaser, as could the head of the company. In some cases, we have multiple contacts within one company or organization who might place an order.

What I want to ultimately be able to do is to mix and match our buyer personas with company types - because a maintainer of a fleet used for commercial fishing, as an example, has to think about the corrosive impact of salt water. But a maintainer at a flight school doesn't have that as a concern.

Moreover, since some companies do multiple things, like a flight school also that also conducts tours, I need to allow for multiple company types to be assigned to a single company.

My goal for all of this is to be able to mix and match various company types with various buyer personas to deliver more refined messaging to a more specific group of contacts than I can at present.

I'm also looking to allow customers to self-select what they view as their company's main line(s) of business in forms and such but I don't want so many options that they say "eff this" and bail.

I looked at "Ideal Customer Profile Tier" - and that's not going to do the trick for the Company Type element. The Persona property is fine for the Buyer Personas, but it won't work for a Company type.

I'm *thinking* my best route is to create a "Customer Type" property with a multiple check box option that would allow for a company with two or more primary functions to select all that apply. But I'm wondering if there's a better method for what I'm seeking to do.

If anyone has done anything like this before, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance!

Bill

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

kvlschaefer — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:39:50 GMT

Hi @Billseng,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community, and for this detailed post!

I wanted to invite our subject matter experts to this conversation.

Hi @franksteiner79, @jolle, @Jnix284 - Do you have any property segmentation advice for @Billseng's use-case?

Thank you!

Best,
Kristen

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Billseng — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:34:47 GMT

Thanks. I'm leaning toward creating a new property, but will wait on feedback before I go that route.

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Jnix284 — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 19:31:55 GMT

@Billseng creating a custom company property to capture this data would be best, whether that's one or more - for example:

Entity type could be a dropdown with: Company, Instituation, Private Owner, Reseller, etc.

Customer type could be a multi-select with: Service Center, Flight Schools, Tour Operators, Police, Fire, and so on...

This would allow you to capture both data points so you can better group them in your reporting.

It sounds like the customer roles are the same, so the Persona value should be enough to capture their role to allow you to tie that in to the company data for workflows, email automation, reporting, etc.

Hope this helps!

topic Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

"Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting

Re: "Company Type" and Buyer Personas Combined for Mix and Match Segmenting