Sojern was rebuilding post-Covid and transitioning from a programmatic advertising partner into a travel marketing platform. I led the product marketing team through that transition, and the foundation of it was a question nobody had properly asked: who are our hotel customers, really?
Sojern's hotel business was divided into SMB and enterprise, a split based on spend levels that matched the org chart rather than the market. It blurred what different hotels actually needed, created internal conflict over accounts, and made it impossible to tell a clear value story. Commodities like marketing channels and pricing models were being called products, and a platform transition cannot stand on that.
The new segmentation came from research, not a whiteboard. I ran market research, talked to customers and the hotel ownership community, and analyzed internal data across product usage, revenue, and sales cycles. Buying behavior, needs, and value opportunity clustered into five distinct segments: chains, groups, independents, management companies, and agencies. Each one buys differently, and none of them buy as "SMB" or "enterprise."
From there I developed the marketecture: the platform's components aligned to customer value, with solutions as configurations for each segment. Instead of offering every hotel the same menu of advertising channels, each segment got a solution shaped around how it actually operates: an independent filling rooms across the year, a global chain running campaigns with hundreds of properties at once, a management company driving performance across a whole portfolio. Every segment got a GTM playbook covering pain points, personas, competitive landscape, messaging, and proof points, which fed demand generation, sales enablement training, and product roadmap priorities. I reorganized the product marketing team to match the segments, so ownership finally lined up with the market.
We proved the approach the way I always do: in market. A strategic-accounts test with global chains taught us where the friction really lived, so we pivoted toward land-and-expand and toward branded groups, who decide faster and try new things sooner. The learning loop mattered as much as the plan.
The repositioning drove 30% revenue growth and 133% ICP penetration, and gave Sojern a platform narrative, segment-based solutions, and a team structure aligned to how the market actually buys. The segmentation became the organizing logic for marketing, sales, and product alike.
This engagement is the shape of my flagship voice-of-customer program, run at in-house scale: research in, repositioning out.