How do you segment your customers? What tools/data/insights do you use?

At all the companies I’ve been at, the one consistent segmentation lens has always been company size. Bigger company = more people = more licenses you can sell. 

Other lens can be the types of customers they serve, type of business (e.g. subscription, marketplace), industries, role/departments, and more. 

Unfortunately, I don't have time to go in-depth in segmentation here, but one piece of advice is to keep it overly simple and don't overcomplicate things. I've seen so many overcomplicated segmentation exercises that live and die in a presentation deck, because everyone in the room is like "duh, I could have told you that." Lots of people and websites say don't talk to internal employees to gather insights about customer segmentation (since it's biased). I say there's probably a lot of institutional knowledge that exists. 

Depending on which part of the funnel you want to segment and whether its for customers or prospects. An often great place to start for customer segmentation is looking at the customer lifecycle, and segmenting based on that -- all the way from onboarding to advocacy. This is of course great for funnel drop off analysis but is also key for tailoring content.

I always segment in three dimensions: One traditional segmentation metric (size, industry, geography, etc.); the problems experienced (that create a need for the product); the different stakeholders (how they experience the problem and what incentives each responds to). That's often difficult to represent visually, but conceptually, I think it helps create a framework for what information is needed, and how to go about gathering it. 

To me, stakeholder segmentation is by far the most important because it is far too often the most overlooked. People talk about a product's value proposition in the context of the "customer" (usually a company) but don't consider that what's "best" for the customer probably isn't "best" for each stakeholder, and the two may in fact directly conflict. Recognizing, and reconciling, those situations in the context of messaging and positioning is crucial.