Enter -title- here

This week brings another “how to” post from yours truly. One hot topic that sales and marketing folks seem to always struggle with is lead and contact segmentation. Over the course of my Salesforce career, I’ve tried a couple different attempts as how to best segment contacts and leads based on title.  Neither are perfect, but I don’t think segmentation ever is. (People don’t like to be in buckets!) Hopefully they will give you some value, or at least provide insight into a different way of doing your segmentation.

More input

The first approach was to increase data collection by added two new picklist fields – one for department and a second for job level. The department field contained values for the typical departments we would sell to, as well as some more general catch-all categories to handle other titles. The job level field contained a range from C-Level to Staff. This allowed us to be able to target the c-suite executive for specific campaigns.

Calculated

In this instance, we weren’t concerned with department as much as job level, so I decided to use a formula field to help calculate the level value. This field remained a work-in-progress and we added values to it as we thought of more options. My original formula is shown below.

IF(ISBLANK(Title), “BLANK”,

IF(CONTAINS(“VP:AVP:Vice:V.P.”, Title), “VP”,

IF(CONTAINS(“CEO:CIO:CTO:COO:CMO”, Title), “C-level”,

IF(CONTAINS(“Manager:MGR:Mgr”, Title), “Manager”,

IF(CONTAINS(“Supervisor”, Title), “Supervisor”,

IF(CONTAINS(“Analyst”, Title), “Analyst”, “Staff”))))))

Now, these won’t be the magic bullet for most organizations. But perhaps you can think about your segmentation in a new way to help your sales and marketing teams target the right folks. What are some other segmentation methods you’ve tried?

Tags: automagic, business, enterprise-it, how to, learning Salesforce, technology, tips and tricks