Broadly speaking, database segmentation is the analyzing and parsing of a customer list in order to find the most profitable customers. Marketers regularly track the activity of customers to identify which are most valuable, and use mining and modeling to predict consumer behavior. Given the success of segmentation in consumer markets, it seems unusual to some that business-to-business marketers have remained on the sidelines.

Many reasons have been suggested for the dearth of current, relevant data on business customers. For one thing, b-to-b marketers have fewer customers than consumer marketers do. That means the value of analytics and predictive modeling is much lower. The higher the number of customers, the greater your ability to slice and dice the data and look for meaningful patterns. Even with segmentation successes, b-to-b marketers are still challenged with ultimately identifying the key decision-maker or buyer. Another problem is that many b-to-b companies tend to be operations-driven, with a heavy reliance on field salespeople, not marketing analysts.

In spite of the difficulties related to b-to-b segmentation, there are a growing number of companies seeking to leverage the power of useful segmentation data in hopes of greater effectiveness in reaching business-to-business markets.