Market segment profile

Purpose

Describe a market segment in operational terms that sales, marketing, product, and leadership can use. The profile links boundary criteria to observed customers and market evidence, then distinguishes segment attractiveness from simple account volume.

Scope

Cover firmographic and behavioral boundaries, buyer roles, jobs and pain points, use cases, trigger events, buying process, price or contract signals, retention, acquisition channel, competitors, regulatory or operational constraints, market size evidence, and fit exclusions. Excluded: declaring a universal ICP, estimating market size without a cited method, setting prices, or changing account classifications.

Data basis

• Customer and account tables: industry, size, geography, product, plan, source, ACV, status, start date, renewal, expansion, churn reason, and usage.
• Win-loss notes, interviews, support themes, campaign results, pipeline, and product analytics.
• Market reports, competitor material, public company data, and the optional segment_focus input when web search is enabled or supplied.
• Segmentation policy, scoring model, and approved definitions in scope.

Result

Produce a segment profile document with definition, evidence, representative patterns, needs, buying committee, economics, competitive context, triggers, exclusions, and risks. Provide a segment evidence sheet with one row per criterion, observation, metric, source, date, and confidence, plus a ranked focus recommendation.

Quality criteria

• Inclusion and exclusion rules are testable against named fields or observable behaviors.
• Customer counts, revenue totals, retention measures, and averages reconcile to the stated population and period.
• At least one counterexample or boundary case is recorded when the corpus contains one.
• Personas and jobs are labelled as observed, reported, or inferred, with citations.
• The focus recommendation shows the scoring inputs and does not confuse market size with fit or willingness to buy.

Instructions

Freeze the population and period before calculating segment metrics. Keep geography, currency, contract type, and product version explicit. Do not let a high-value outlier define a segment without testing the rest of the population. Compare included and excluded accounts when evidence allows. When external research conflicts with customer evidence, show both and explain the scope difference. Use company terminology and put assumptions beside the metric they affect.

Adapt before use

• Map account, customer, product, revenue, retention, usage, campaign, and win-loss fields.
• Define segment dimensions, minimum sample size, fit score weights, periods, and market-sizing method.
• Add approved personas, industry taxonomy, geographic rules, and research sources to the scope.