Segment Launches Segment Select, A New Program To Help Companies Leverage First-Party Data Through Certified Partners

By STS News Desk On Jan 25, 2019

Segment Launches Segment Select, A New Program To Help Companies Leverage First-Party Data Through Certified Partners

New Program Will Also Help Partners Access Growing Market Opportunity Around Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI)

Segment, the customer data infrastructure company, launched Segment Select, a new program designed to help Channel and Technology Partners easily build and implement solutions for their customers that leverage Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI). Segment Select provides partners with technical certification, sales training, dedicated technical support, and personalized co-marketing opportunities.

“The category leaders of tomorrow will be defined by their ability to turn raw, first-party data into consistent and tailored customer experiences,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder at Segment. “Segment’s mission is to deliver the data infrastructure that helps companies put their customers at the heart of every decision. Segment Select helps our customers do this by deepening our engagement with trusted partners, broadening support options, and making it easier to architect, implement, and build on their first-party customer data.”

Helping Partners Solve a $756 Billion Problem

Today’s consumers expect companies to provide highly relevant, contextualized experiences wherever they interact with a business. However, all too often, companies struggle to meet these expectations because they can’t integrate their first-party data effectively. Instead, they rely on legacy CRM and a patchwork of integrations and data pipelines to try to understand and interact with their customers. This failure to consolidate and activate first-party data has real business impact: Accenture estimates that poor personalization and lack of trust from consumers costs U.S. organizations $756 billion annually.

Segment solves this problem with Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI), a complete and flexible architecture for businesses to gather, manage, and route their customer data to any business unit and any application with just a flip of a switch. As companies look for better ways to integrate their customer data, CDI is set to be a major growth area for system integrators and development firms, as well as any Technology Partner, that want to help brands harness their first-party data and put customers first.

Segment Select helps partners tap into this market opportunity by equipping them with the certification, tools, and expertise they need to help customers implement Segment and its multiple product offerings. The program is open to two types of partners:

Channel Partners, such as growth and analytics consultancies, development firms, and system integrators – will be able to grow their revenue by helping clients implement or build on Segment to deliver exceptional experiences informed by first-party customer data. Segment Select empowers channel partners to succeed by providing a comprehensive program of sales training, technical support, and certification.

Technology Partners are companies that directly integrate with Segment’s product. Segment Select gives Technology Partners access to technical certifications and support, including a fully-featured sandbox to test software applications. These partners will also have the opportunity to collaborate on sales and marketing initiatives with Segment’s in-house teams.

Each approved Channel or Technology Partner will have the opportunity to access the following benefits:

Sales support and enablement. This includes partner-specific go-to-market opportunities to identify and promote unique partner stories. Activities also include co-selling, custom marketing collateral, a listing on Segment’s website, and a fully-featured Segment test account.
Segment certification program. Segment’s new sales and technical certification program provides learning modules to gain expertise in CDI. The technical track covers content including Segment’s data model, tracking plan build process, and implementation. The sales track teaches the Segment value proposition and provides key customer use cases.
Dedicated partner team. Partners will have access to a relationship manager that provides technical pre-sales support and on-site, in-person training.

Segment Select has more than 50 partners at launch. Initial Technology Partners include Looker, Braze, Amplitude, Snowflake, and Iterable. Channel Partners for Segment Select include VaynerMedia, BCG Digital Ventures, and Adviso.

Keenan Rice, VP of Strategic Alliances at Technology Partner, Looker said, “Having a consistent pipeline of clean and standardized first-party data from Segment is an extremely valuable and core data set for our customers’ success. Our partnership with Segment provides an out-of-the-box analytics experience on this data so our customers can quickly realize the value of creating a data-driven organization.”

Tony Pelosi, Product Director at Channel Partner, BCG Digital Ventures, added: “We’ve chosen to offer Segment integration services because Segment solves a clear business problem of reducing the engineering burden for utilizing customer data. With Segment, customers can write analytics code once for a variety of analytics tools, reduce the need for maintaining a data warehouse, and enable easy debugging to investigate issues. The result means more time spent acting on data than building the pipelines to measure it.”