Insights — Channel Creation & New Revenue Streams — 3 min read
How to Find New Customer Segments
Finding new customer segments isn't about guesswork. It's about a disciplined analysis of who has the problem you solve, who has the budget to fix it, and who is currently underserved.
In short
To find new customer segments, start by mapping your existing customers' common traits — not just their industries, but their growth stage, their internal processes, and the 'events' that trigger them to buy. Then, look for other groups that share those triggers or processes. Use a mix of database analysis, competitor 'shadowing' (seeing who they ignore), and 'problem-first' searches to identify groups that have the same need but are currently looking in the wrong places.
Growth often stalls not because the product is bad, but because the current well has run dry. Every market segment has a ceiling. Once you have reached a certain level of penetration, the cost of acquiring the next customer becomes prohibitively high. This is the moment when many businesses start looking for new products to sell, but the more efficient route is often to find new customers for the product you already have.
Finding a new customer segment is a process of expanding your definition of who 'counts' as a prospect. It requires moving away from demographic or industry-only definitions and moving towards functional and behavioural definitions.
Step 1: The 'Trigger' Analysis
Customers don't wake up and decide to buy a B2B service for no reason. Something happened. A new regulation was passed, a competitor launched a new product, a key member of staff left, or they reached a certain level of turnover. These are 'triggers'.
List the triggers for your current best customers. Then, ask who else experiences these triggers. If a 'merger or acquisition' is a trigger for your IT integration service, don't just look at law firms merging. Look at dental practices, accounting firms, and small manufacturing groups. The trigger is the constant; the industry is the variable.
Step 2: Look for the 'Underserved Middle'
Markets are often well-served at the very top (Enterprise) and at the very bottom (Solo/Micro). The 'middle' is where new segments are often hidden. These are companies that are too big for the 'off-the-shelf' consumer tools but too small for the massive corporate consultants.
- Companies that have recently outgrown their current DIY solutions.
- Businesses in 'unfashionable' industries that tech companies often ignore.
- Regional businesses that prefer local or specialised expertise over national brands.
- Subsidiaries of larger groups that have their own autonomous budgets.
Step 3: The 'Adjacent Capability' Search
Who buys the product that is used immediately before or immediately after yours? These are 'adjacent' segments. If you sell commercial kitchen maintenance, your adjacent segments are the companies that sell the kitchens, the companies that design the restaurants, and the companies that provide the insurance for those venues.
Step 4: Using the Opportunity Engine
Manually searching for new segments is slow. The Evans Opportunity Engine automates the identification of potential segments by looking for patterns across vast datasets of company behaviour. It identifies clusters of organisations that exhibit the same 'buying signals' as your current customers, even if they operate in sectors you've never considered.
The objective is not to find a thousand new leads. It is to find one or two new segments that are large enough to sustain a dedicated sales effort, but small enough that you can quickly become a dominant player within them.
Could your business support another route to revenue?
Evans Channel Creation identifies, validates and builds additional revenue channels from capabilities a business already has — B2B to D2C, D2C to B2B, product to service, recurring revenue or partners — and says so plainly when a channel should not be built. Programme from £1,995 + VAT per month over six months.
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