I'm in the midst of thinking about vertical markets and customer segmentation and the onset of a new CRM implementation, and what comes to mind is concisely stated in this article about the importance of profiling customers and designing your systems and processes to meet their unqique goals in a segmented fashion. I know, not real earth-shattering stuff, but come on, how many of you are really thinking this way. (we aren't...yet!)

It looks like this...

Identifying target users of any particular touchpoint -- a Web site, for example -- is the first step. That data can be organized into segments, and from those segments the company can create a persona -- a hypothetical customer -- that represents each category.