Industry Segmentation: Find More Fleets Like Your Top 10% Customers
One way to get big results out of prospecting data: Choose the fleets most likely to be more profitable new customers.
How? You could segment CRM data by industries with fleet vehicles.
It’s likely that some industries contribute far more to your success. Your best bet is to focus prospecting where you’re already strong. Get more of that fleet data first.
Here, we show:
- How to segment your customers by industry
- Find your top performing industries
- Use your analysis to acquire the best prospecting data for you.
Create customer industry segments
This analysis should focus only on customer accounts, not prospects. Because you want to find the best performing industries among your current customers.
First, ensure your customer account data is well-populated with industry data: SIC codes, NAICS, or detailed industry keywords (consistently formatted like from a picklist). In this post, we’ll use SICs.
Then, add performance metrics that are important to you. We’ll use revenue here.
Group all your accounts by SIC. Then sort by your performance metric.
Then, keeping the data sorted by performance metric, divide groups of SICs into 10 segments. So for example, if you have 120 SICs in your customer data, divide those 120 SICs into 10 segments. You’ll end up with 12 industries per segment.
The result is, industries ranked #1-12 by revenue will be combined into the first “Top 10% SIC Decile” group. Industries ranked #13-24 by revenue will be the second “Top 20% SIC Decile” group. And so on.
Why do this? Remember the 80/20 pattern.
That is, more or less, 80% of revenue comes from about 20% of customers. The segments will show who your most valuable customers are, and which industries they come from.
Here you can clearly see how the above data shakes out:
In the chart above, only 12 industries bring nearly 80% of the revenue.
When acquiring prospect data, focus on your top industry segments.
Resist a temptation to buy records in the bottom segments, with the hope that there’s opportunity there.
It will be tougher to get traction and win there. Time and opportunity could be squandered. Best bet is to focus on prospects where you are already strong.
Map against the fleet or trucking data you’re purchasing
Next, if you are acquiring data, find out how many companies in the database or list fit your top performing fleet industry segments. Ask for this information before you purchase.
This way, you know whether this data is a good fit … for your needs.
If you’re working with Valgen for custom fleet data, we can append your data with SIC codes, do industry analysis for you, and we can give you an estimate of how much fleet data fits your top customer industry segments. You can also load SIC and NAICS into our online fleet and trucking database to find the best prospects for you.
President & CEO at Valgen
Rainmaker extraordinaire for our clients. Turns databases into gold. Analytics executive and entrepreneur with a track record of producing significant and sustained revenue gains for sales teams in fleet, transportation, high tech & financial services.
