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Roberge: Early startups should segment ICP targets into Green, Yellow, and Red tiers

Mark Roberge · Mark Roberge: The Framework for How Startups Should Scale into the Enterprise -Stage 2 Capital|E1176 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 12, 2024 · at 38:25

Mark Roberge, Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital and former CRO at HubSpot, details his customer segmentation framework for early-stage sales development teams.

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“Cause we just don't know, but like there's some folks I like to do like a green, yellow, red. I have different attributes. Like, you know, how many employees were they located in the world? What sectors are they in these types of things? Right. And the green is like, we have strong conviction that those are good fits right between, between 5500 employees based in the U S in tech. That's green. And we're going to go after those all day. So when our SDRs are cold calling, they're only cold calling those people. Then there's reds where we have strong conviction. We will not sell. In fact, you cannot sell them. Okay. So that might be outside of English speaking territories. That might be healthcare nonprofit government, and it might be like greater than 10,000 employees. Those are red. You are not allowed to sell them. Yellow is you can sell them if they're inbound. So we're not going to cold call them, but if they come inbound, we don't have enough conviction to know that they're not a fit. We also don't have enough conviction to like go outbound. So that's how I kind of try to think about it in that green, yellow, red mindset, at least to start.”

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