Customer segmentation in most companies is starting to look like a hairy knuckle dragger, mired in a Stone Age era defined mostly by demographics. The successor on the evolutionary scale, segmentation by vertical, is so commonplace that it is going to win as many battles for business as a Bronze Age spear.

We know that B2B marketing needs to become more personal. The demand is a byproduct of the civil war raging in most businesses between traditional corporate computing and the consumer-based applications that employees are bringing into work.

Good consumer applications live and die by their level of personalization—indeed, some predict that Facebook will be overtaken by more atomized versions that hew more narrowly to people’s personal interests.

But the problem with the rush to personalization—or personas, or role-based marketing, or whatever else you want to call it—is that B2B ain’t like consumer marketing. It is schizoid. The B2B “buyer” is really many people, from the CEO to the business user, from the CIO to the programmer. With so many different constituencies in the purchasing process (never mind the installation and long-term usage processes), and with many overlapping interests across these many groups (good project managers are interested in business value, just like the CFO) marketers can drive themselves crazy and drain their meager budgets pretty quickly.

Yet there is no turning back. IT people are the fastest adopters of Web 2.0 technologies and they have a growing expectation for personalized content that is not going away anytime soon. The issue then becomes refining the personalization strategy so that it has the most impact on a limited budget. I think that translates into six drivers:

1. Prioritize. Of all the different job roles and people involved in the purchase, installation and long-term usage processes, some matter more than others. Interview sales people to find out who they are and start there.
2. Automate. Clearly, marketers need to let the website and social media do the heavy lifting on personalization through such techniques as portals, dynamic content and online communities.
3. Educate. Even if the content doesn’t turn out to be as personal as you wished or as customers expected, making sure that it educates all readers on an important business or technology issue—not just your products and services—will dispel much, if not all, of the disappointment.
4. Reuse. You should have two different types of content: core content and personalized content. The fundamental messages of the white papers and web seminars can be used in many different settings. The personal content can be a tweak of the core—say rewriting the top and bottom third of a whitepaper—or a layer on top of the core—like bringing in an outside speaker to a webinar to add a personalized layer on top of your company’s presentation.
5. Aggregate. A gazillion bloggers can’t be wrong. Using others’ content as a jumping off point for a more personalized dialogue is cheap and easy.
6. Commit. You can’t love them and then leave them after they’ve purchased. The shift to personalization needs an attendant shift in marketing emphasis away from the almighty lead and toward the existing customer.

Various forms of personalization filled the agendas of most speakers at Forrester’s Marketing Conference in LA this week—a classy, informative event that I recommend heartily, even though the emphasis is more on B2C than B2B.

Many buzzwords are tossed about at conferences like this, but two stood out for me when it comes to personalization: personas and roles. The difference between the two seems to boil down to this: roles have a job and personas have a name. Personas are all the rage on the B2C side. Product development labs are filled with cardboard cutouts of people named Bob or Sally who are obsessively researched and compiled through techniques like ethnography.

Roles are more relevant on the B2B side because there is not a single buyer—there are many different people with different jobs involved in the decision. At the conference, Forrester analyst Alan Webber highlighted what he believes to be the seven most important roles in B2B:

• Sales
• Purchasing
• Line of business
• Product development
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Corporate

Another Forrester analyst, Eric Brown, says that role-based marketing is beginning to take off: 23 of the 100 largest technology companies are doing it, up from just one in 2006. The best example he offered was SunGard, which carves out 32 different roles on its website.

However, SunGard groups the roles under the heading “users,” which demonstrates the complexity of the role-based strategy. There are a certain set of roles in the purchase process and others after the software goes in. Some roles will cross over between those two different stages of the relationship and some will not. It will be a challenge to manage that transition smoothly.

What do you think? Have you tried personas or role-based marketing? Do you think personalization is overrated?