Recently a business student asked me, "How do you find your best customers?" I explained that typically it starts with understanding your customer's needs, identifying the high opportunity segments and then devising effective strategies to attract more of them.

Then it really hit me: Understanding customer needs is by far the easier part of segmentation.

Understanding how to connect a company's efforts with customer needs--so you can increase the number of customers in your sweet spot--that's often the more difficult part.

Companies often perform elaborate segmentation studies that wind up sitting on a shelf. The real challenge is getting everyone on board to deliver compelling solutions for each segment--integrating corporate needs and customer needs, so you can increase your "best customer" pool.

The missing link? Delivering useful, actionable information that turns insight into impact. That's why we see segmentation--not as a study--but as a strategic process.

Here are some of the questions that drive actionable answers:

• Are we delivering the right products or services to the right targets?
• How will we develop the right communications plan?
• And most importantly--can we achieve an ROI that makes it all worthwhile?

Surprisingly, the most difficult part of the process is having the right people in the room. Before we talk to a single customer, we need to set expectations within the client organization--we must:

• Line up the stakeholders
• Define objectives
• Agree to a process that translates the insights from the research into tactics

Use segmentation to provide your organization with focus.
Once you agree to the above steps you’ll be amazed at the clarity that follows. Too often, even after companies segment the market, they try to target virtually everyone; when they should focus on defining the key segments for them. Targeting is not about turning away business - no one wants to do that. Rather it is about prioritizing resources where they will do the most good and making sure that what you are offering and communicating is in line with what the "right" people want.

Segmentation becomes a strategic filter that can focus the efforts of your entire organization. You may very well be surprised by the financial results of this approach. But, after all, isn’t that what you want?