B2B companies invest a lot of energy in segmentation: industries, regions, tiers, and detailed personas. On paper, it looks sophisticated. In practice, it often doesn’t help GTM teams decide where to focus first or how to win.

Neil Baron, Managing Director at Baron Strategic Partners, sees this repeatedly: teams can describe ideal customers, but they struggle to prioritize the segments where needs are most urgent, and the value story is strongest. The result is scattered effort, long cycles, and good-looking deals that never close.

His answer: build ICP segment playbooks that organize go-to-market around urgency of need, not just demographic fit.

From “who they are” to “how much it matters right now”

Traditional segmentation centers on who the customer is (size, vertical, tech stack). Neil pushes teams to add a more practical lens:

• How big is the problem we solve for this segment?
• How visible is it to leadership?
• How much pressure are they under to act?

Two accounts might look identical on paper, but if one is under real pressure to change and the other isn’t, they don’t belong in the same priority bucket. That difference in urgency should drive targeting, messaging, and resourcing.

What lives inside an ICP segment playbook

An ICP segment playbook is an organizational alignment tool and not just a sales playbook.  Marketing and sales enablement teams often create sales playbooks, roadmaps that guide reps on how to handle specific sales calls. A segment playbook provides a north star for all of the customer-facing teams. Each one should help GTM teams quickly answer:

• Who’s in this segment?
  Inclusion criteria, example accounts, buying centers.
  
• What’s driving urgency?
  Triggers, risks, outcomes that make the problem hard to ignore.
  
• Why do we win here?
  Segment-specific value propositions, use cases, and proof points.
  
• How do we execute?
  Recommended campaigns, discovery questions, talk tracks, and success plays.
  

When someone opens the playbook, they should see how it applies to their territory, to their role, and what to do next.

Segmentation that actually changes behavior

Segmentation only matters if it changes how teams spend time.

Where ICP segment playbooks work well, you see:

• Marketing concentrating programs where urgency and fit overlap.
• SDRs and AEs prioritizing outreach by segment plays, not generic cadences.
• Customer Success using the same logic to guide onboarding, adoption, and expansion.
• Professional services teams understand how to cross-sell various offerings

Because everyone works from the same segment narratives, handoffs are smoother, and opportunities are evaluated through a shared lens.

Start with one segment that truly matters

Neil doesn’t recommend rebuilding everything at once. Start with a single must-win segment.  A lot of companies struggle to pick the right place to start.  It is not just “must win” but also “most desirable”. For example, for a mature product, your main options are to take share from competitors or to help customers who don’t see a need recognize that they actually have one.

For a first-to-market offering, it makes sense to focus on those prospects with the most urgent need.

• The need is clear and recurring
• Your solution is a strong, repeatable fit
• You can point to credible outcomes

Build one segment playbook, test it, refine based on real deals, then expand.

The payoff is focus. Instead of spreading effort across any account that could buy, you direct teams toward the segments where your solution solves a pressing problem and your story is strongest, turning segmentation from theory into a practical growth engine.