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What it is

segment is the commercial group an account belongs to. Beacon builds the set of groups from your own customer base rather than from a fixed list, so both the names and the number of groups differ between companies. A set holds between 3 and 12 segments. A segment must hold at least 10 active accounts or 5% of total recurring revenue; below that it is merged into an adjacent segment.

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How it is calculated

Measured. Accounts are grouped on six weighted dimensions. Depth follows what is connected. With contract and firmographic data only, the grouping produces 3 to 5 segments at an accuracy band of plus or minus 40%. Adding product usage produces 5 to 8 segments at plus or minus 25%. With customer and financial sources connected, the grouping produces 5 to 10 segments at plus or minus 12%. Naming a segment, merging two, splitting one or renaming one is never automatic. Each requires your approval. Dimension weights change at most once in 90 days, and a full restructure at most once in 180 days.

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Where it comes from

Identity resolution must cover at least 80% of your largest accounts by revenue before segments are reliable, because groups built on unresolved duplicates describe patterns that do not exist. Where a source is missing, the grouping still runs at a shallower depth with a wider accuracy band rather than returning nothing.

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How fresh it is

An account is reclassified as soon as it crosses a segment boundary. Segment-level health is recalculated daily. The full set of segments is reviewed quarterly. Segment carries no monthly seal. Where more than 5% of a segment’s accounts migrate within 30 days, an alert is raised for review.

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Currency and rounding

Neither applies to the value itself, which is a label. The revenue figures used to place an account are converted into your single reporting currency before any grouping is calculated.

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What changes it

Movement on any of the six dimensions: a change in retention trajectory, churn or expansion likelihood, feature adoption, usage intensity, contract value or discount level, firmographic detail, or fit tier. Connecting a new source can move the grouping to a deeper layer and re-cut the whole set. An approved merge, split, rename or weight change re-runs the grouping within the limits above. Every reassignment is recorded with its timestamp, the depth in force at the time, and the previous segment.

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What it is not

  • Not a size band. Company size carries 0.15 of six dimensions. Grouping by size alone puts together accounts that look alike and behave differently.
  • Not a cohort. Cohorts group accounts by when they arrived or activated. Segment is one of the dimensions a cohort can be cut by, not a synonym for one.
  • Not the segment field in your CRM. That field is an input to the grouping and is not published back as the answer.
  • Not lifecycle_stage. Segment is which group an account belongs to; stage is where the account has reached after the sale.
  • Not a segment health score. That value describes a segment’s own health and does not classify individual accounts.