In a recent eye-opening video titled "The STUPID Reason Why Companies Leave Money on the Table," Ajit Ghuman from Monetizely reveals a critical blind spot affecting 95% of SaaS companies: outdated and misaligned customer segmentation. This short but powerful discussion exposes how this seemingly administrative oversight is actually costing companies significant revenue.
The Segmentation Crisis No One Is Talking About
Customer segmentation should be the backbone of your pricing strategy, but for most companies, it's treated as a one-time exercise that quickly collects dust. As Ajit points out: "The lack of understanding of customer ICP and segmentation is almost 95%, even in as little as a year's amount of time, customer segmentation work that is done once is left on the shelf. People don't refer to it."
This neglect creates organizational chaos. Everyone operates with their own mental model of who the customer actually is:
- CEOs have their idealistic vision of target customers
- Sales teams have moved beyond the original documentation
- Marketing and product teams work from their own "ivory towers" of customer understanding
- Customer success managers see only the tail end of the business
The result? "Everybody has a different view of customer segmentation," Ajit explains. This misalignment isn't just a minor inconvenience—it's actively sabotaging your revenue potential.
The Financial Cost of Poor Segmentation
The financial implications of this misalignment are staggering. When you don't truly understand your customer segments, you're missing out on the most fundamental profit opportunity in business:
"The number one place that you are going to make money as a company is price discrimination," Ajit states. "In an airline setting that means charging more from the first class buyers than the business, than the economy. But what happens when you don't know who the first class buyers are? What happens when there are first class buyers and you are charging them economy prices?"
This isn't hypothetical—it's happening constantly. Companies are failing to identify their premium customers and missing opportunities to charge them appropriately for the value they receive. It's like having first-class passengers paying economy prices while you wonder why profit margins are shrinking.
The Domino Effect on Product Strategy
Poor customer segmentation creates a cascade of strategic errors that extend beyond just pricing:
"Because they don't understand segmentation, they directly go to approaches such as good, better, best packaging, and they blindly sort features into these packages without understanding the real needs of these segments and their willingness to pay," Ajit explains.
This "blind" approach to packaging leads to:
- Lackluster revenue performance
- Reactive rather than strategic decision making
- Over-focus on competition instead of customer needs
When segmentation is weak, companies stop focusing on their unique value proposition and start obsessively watching competitors. As Ajit notes, "Then you start to look at competition rather than focus on your customer and their needs."
Breaking the Hypnosis
The most alarming part of Ajit's message is how widespread this problem has become: "This has become so prevalent and I feel like the industry is completely hypnotized. But it's time to wake up."
It's a strong accusation, but the statistics back it up: "nine out of 10 companies are not paying attention. So the chances are very likely that you are not either."
The Path Forward
The solution is straightforward but requires commitment:
- Revisit your customer segmentation regularly
- Ensure alignment across departments
- Use updated segmentation to inform packaging and pricing
- Focus on customer needs rather than competitive positioning
As Ajit concludes: "Take a look at this, update it, use that to update packaging, and you'll realize that there is money that you had access to that you did not know."
Time for Action
If your customer segmentation document is older than a year, if your teams don't reference the same customer profiles, or if your pricing feels more like guesswork than strategy, you're almost certainly losing money.
The good news? This problem is fixable with focused attention and organizational alignment. By bringing your understanding of customer segments back to the center of your strategy, you can unlock revenue that's been hiding in plain sight all along.
The question isn't whether you can afford to invest time in better segmentation—it's whether you can afford not to.
Check out more at Monetizely's website, www.getmonetizely.com