From Dirty Data to Growth Engine:
Customer Segmentation Overhaul Unlocks Leads & Cross-Selling
Building Data Segmentation by Product
Client Overview
A global professional development and leadership training organization with multiple product lines serving thousands of learners worldwide. Marketing and sales operated in silos, causing inconsistent customer experiences and inefficient communication. Known for its variety of courses and learning pathways, the company was struggling to nurture customers effectively across its eight core products due to fragmented data and one-size-fits-all marketing.
The Challenge
For years, the organization operated with only one lifecycle field in its CRM. That meant:
A customer who bought one product was tagged as a “customer” for all products, leaving no visibility into their journey across other offerings.
Advanced product leads were mistakenly reset as “new leads” when they downloaded resources, triggering irrelevant intro-level campaigns.
Marketing blasted emails to nearly 40,000 records, even though only ~5,000 were active, producing redundancy, customer complaints, and unsubscribes.
Sales and Marketing couldn’t align on MQL/SQL definitions, leading to conflicting outreach and multiple emails hitting the same person.
This resulted in redundant communications, wasted effort, and customers receiving content that didn’t reflect their actual stage in the buying journey. In addition:
• Increased customer frustration and unsubscribes.
• Missed opportunities to nurture leads effectively.
• Marketing resources wasted on existing customers who didn’t need the messaging.
Competitively, this was high-stakes. The company was already losing market share to rivals with stronger personalization and more agile digital practices.
My Role & Approach
As Acting Director of Sales, I partnered with Sales, Marketing, and IT to re-architect the CRM (HubSpot) and create product-level journeys for all eight offerings. My responsibilities included:
Historical Data Migration: Cleaning and uploading 20 years of attendance data from two legacy systems plus a new ERP into HubSpot.
Journey Mapping & Field Creation: Building new product fields (rather than touching Marketing’s lifecycle field) to track each customer’s journey individually by product.
Workflow Automation: Designing “if/then” triggers to update fields when customers completed courses, downloaded content, or engaged with webinars.
Collaboration & Compromise: Navigating Marketing’s resistance to altering lifecycle fields by introducing parallel product-specific fields — a compromise that preserved their metrics while delivering needed segmentation.
Governance Setup: Training IT on the system, documenting workflows, and recommending monthly hygiene and segmentation audits.
Actions Taken
Segmentation Overhaul:
Rebuilt CRM structures to reflect journeys for all eight products, not just the introductory course.
Mapped the full journey for each product, from initial lead through post-purchase retention.
Defined clear handoff points between marketing and sales with associated actions and SLAs.
Data Cleansing & Integration:
Removed outdated records and integrated ERP feeds to ensure live course completions were reflected in HubSpot.
Established criteria for labeling customers at each stage.
Resolved tagging errors to ensure accurate segmentation.
Built new automated workflows to maintain segmentation integrity.
Sales Enablement:
Gave Sales reports that revealed “sitting duck” leads already in the system, eliminating the need to work outside the CRM.
Collaborated with Marketing, frontline sales, and customers to rewrite sales follow-up sequences (sales email marketing).
Designed and implemented a new sales engine with content tailored to the customer’s stage and product line.
Reduced email volume while improving relevance and value of messages.
Customer Journey Visualization:
Created workflow maps and project documentation to make the logic transparent across teams.
Facilitated workshops with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Experience teams to align language, timing, and messaging priorities.
Created shared visibility for all customer communications to prevent overlap or conflicting messages.
Results
Targeting Accuracy: Reduced redundant/irrelevant emails by 80%, ensuring customers only received messaging relevant to their current program. (The other 20% uncovered other issues: duplicate accounts and customers of our licensee partners).
Open Rates: Jumped from 3% → 60%, showing the power of cleaner, more personalized outreach reflecting a smaller but more relevant audience finally getting targeted campaigns.
Complaints: Service team saw a 95% drop in complaint emails about irrelevant marketing.
Sales Impact: Early signs of 10–15% increase in cross-sells into intermediate and advanced programs.
Sales Productivity: Reps uncovered dormant leads already in the CRM, speeding up follow-up without relying on Marketing.
Key Takeaway
This project demonstrated that dirty data isn’t just messy — it erodes brand trust, damages customer experience, creates operational inefficiencies, and ultimately threatens revenue stability.
By cleaning 20 years of customer data and building product-level segmentation, the organization finally had the foundation for personalized, journey-based marketing and cross-selling at scale.
Pillar Breakdown
• 25% Customer Experience
• 25% Process Optimization
• 25% Digital Transformation
• 25% Cultural/Organizational Transformation