B2B SaaS products are very different to manage than other product types because they’re accessible from anywhere and have the potential to evolve continuously. This means your product management team isn’t constrained by local servers to iterate and can quickly deploy new versions as needed. And users are typically not tied to expensive pre-paid licenses or long-term contracts and can cancel their subscription in just a few clicks – keeping you on your toes to ensure they are seeing value every day.

That’s why you must give your customers good reason to spend money with you every month. But that’s easier said than done. Your users’ needs are distinct and changing as they move along the customer journey and product managers must understand how their application works for different segments at each stage if they want to create products that are useful to their customers.

To lend a hand in setting up your segments, we’ve compiled a short list of user types which should be useful as part of your segmentation efforts.

  1. Trial users

Getting free trial users to sign up is half the battle. But since less than 25% of free users convert into paying users on average, you now need to guide them so they can make the most out of your product from day one. Timely communications are essential here. For instance, users are ten times more likely to complete a transaction when they receive a welcome email immediately after registering instead of a few hours later. You can also set trigger events based on actual behaviors directly inside your product – e.g. creating a guided tour the first time a user accesses your application or if they seem stuck after spending a long time on a page.

  1. Power users

Power users are the most active users of your product and they generate a lot of data. This segment is very helpful as a basis for iteration and to conduct A/B tests – assessing the potential for new features ordesign, different copy or visuals, etc. These users also have become very knowledgeable about your application and could be a reliable source of product feedback.

  1. Highest-paying or highest-potential accounts

Following the 80/20 rule, it’s likely that a small portion of your users generate (or will generate) most of your revenue. And knowing who your highest-value and highest-potential subscribers are is essential to understanding the feature sets that are driving the highest value accounts. Your product management team might even want to prioritize the needs of those users to grow the business and prevent those customers from churning. In fact, the average cost of solving a user query is the same among segments, but the extra value you can expect to receive with this category of customers is far higher.

  1. Users who have gone inactive

Inactive users are never good news for a SaaS business. Perhaps they stopped seeing the value of your application. Or they might have started a free trial with a competitor to check how you compare. Either way, you want to have a strategy in place to flag those users and give them a reason to come back. You could, for example, monitor for any significant usage discrepancies between the last 30 days and previous weeks or months to discover events that may have caused a user to stop logging in.

  1. Users who have never used your core features

Users who don’t benefit from your whole value proposition are more likely to end up with your competitors. To prevent this from happening, you may consider offering contextual help to steer users back on the right track or choose to iterate the product to better hihglight these features. And taking your segmentation strategy a step further, you could also identify the free-trial users that belong to this segment and devise personalized offers as a way to convince them to become paying customers – highlighting what they’re missing out on without a paid account.

  1. Customers across NPS ratings

Referrals are almost four times as likely to convert into an opportunity compared to the mix of other lead generation sources – with 8 out of 10 B2B businesses starting the buying process with positive word of mouth. However, you don’t want to focus all of your energy on promoters; detractors and passives may even be more critical. You may also want to devise customer feedback surveys or sessions from those different groups to help drive product iteration.

  1. Early adopters and/or beta users

The needs of early adopters and beta users are often more pronounced than the rest of the market. These subscribers are willing to provide feedback and ideas for iteration and don’t expect everything to be perfect right from the start. They can be an excellent source of inspiration to innovate and anticipate needs that will generalize in the future.

These segments may or may not be a perfect fit for your business, but they are a great place to start. What are your top segments? Continue the conversation in our Customer Growth Community on LinkedIn.