As a savvy data-driven B2B sales and marketing professional, you’ll just love technographics. The technographics data provides you a thorough understanding of the software and hardware installed at the premises of your target accounts. And the technographics-backed business insights enable you to breakdown the technology adoption behaviors of your target accounts.
Some of the world’s leading technology sales and marketing teams use technographics Data-backed business insights and technographics data to collect more information on projected technology adoption and technology adoption sequence behaviors of their target accounts. This helps them greatly to plan highly effective outreach strategies and campaigns that successfully results in more conversions.
One of the top challenges faced by B2B sales and marketing teams is prioritizing their outreach for the right prospects or accounts. It can be tough to segment your outreach properly if you have a database filled with hundreds, or thousands, of accounts so that you can target the right audience with the most relevant message.
Technographics data helps you fix your outreach challenge by showing you what technology solutions your accounts have installed, how much they spend on those technology solutions, and when the contracts for those technology solutions are up for renewal. It becomes much easier to generate more revenue faster from your sales and marketing outreach when you have this type of tech intelligence integrated into your MAP or CRM because you can focus your efforts on:
- Reaching accounts or prospects using solutions you compete well against or complement with your own solution
- Accounts with the highest revenue potential
- Accounts that are working with an integration partner you prefer or are up for renewal
Top 3 B2B Account Scoring Use Cases That Maximize Sales:
How do you prioritize which accounts your sales and marketing teams should go after when you have hundreds or thousands of accounts in your MAP or CRM. Technographics data provides the key insights for growing companies that their teams need to accurately identify the accounts that are over 60% more likely to close successfully. This is why the organizations that use technographics data to assign scores to their target accounts cite technographics data as the most important component of their success.
Unlike broad firmographic data fields like the number of employees, company size, industry, and annual revenue, technographics data helps you to identify the technology footprint of your ideal customers. What this means is that you know if your target accounts are using a complementary or competing technology solution to yours, you know if they are using legacy or obsolete solutions, and you know if they’re an early adopter of SaaS applications.
All of this intelligence gives you the information you can use to prioritize your outreach strategy on the accounts that are most likely to purchase from you. Additionally, it allows you to reach out to them in a more strategic manner with a message that is much more relevant than if you knew nothing about your target account other than basic firmographic data.
Top Account Scoring Use Cases:
Account scoring using technographics data automates account prioritization in your MAP or CRM to make sure that your marketing and sales teams follow up with the target accounts that match closely with your ideal customer profile (ICP) first. For the companies that use technographics data, the most successful account scoring use cases are as follows;
- Complementary Campaigns: score target accounts that use a technology solution you enhance and reach out to them with your value proposition.
- Competitive Displacement: boost scoring for target accounts using competitor software or hardware solutions and target them with a message that clearly shows how you solve their pain points.
- Upsell/Cross-sell: know the entire technology environment of your target accounts and forward target accounts that are using legacy solutions to your sales and marketing teams for outreach automatically.
Technographics for Improved Competitor Analysis:
The overall business strategy of an organization can be indicated by its technology adoption pattern. The business insights that technographics data provides help B2B sales and marketing teams to elevate their competitor analysis.
Technographics data doesn’t just help to identify the best sales opportunities; it also helps to act on it. Technographics data improves competitor analysis by enabling you to better curate your offerings depending on the current as well as the future technology requirements of your target accounts.
Technographics data can help with the following;
- Study the techno-marketing strategy of your target accounts
- Identify your main competitors including what vertical they plan to target next
- Identify new markets as well as new market opportunities
5 B2B Marketing Campaigns That Generate More Revenue:
You know, as a sales and marketing professional, that sales and marketing campaigns are most effective when they are highly relevant to your target audience. Actually, according to MailChimp, relevant sales and marketing campaigns that are targeted to the right audience have a 75% higher engagement rate; and according to SiriusDecisions, it can increase the selling price of your solutions by 35% to 40%. But, being highly relevant and targeted is possible only when you have access to the right technographics data in your MAP or CRM.
Demographics and firmographics data can serve as a starting point for targeting, however, to really generate qualified leads, truly increase engagement, and finally drive increased revenue, the demand gen teams depend on technographics data.
The technographics data helps them to see what hardware or software technology solution their target accounts have installed so they implement segmentation more precisely. Additionally, it helps them inform their messaging so they can build more relevant advertisements, landing pages, emails, and other targeted content that better engages their target audience.
The following are five campaigns that the demand gen teams can create and launch quickly when they use technographics data to segment their list of target accounts in their CRM or MAP;
- Up-sell: See exactly which accounts are using unsupported or old solutions and engage them with the campaigns that encourage them to consider an alternative solution or upgrade.
- Cross-sell: If you have a family of solutions, identify the accounts that could be a great fit for one of your other solutions because they have nothing similar installed at their premises.
- Competitive Take Out: Identify the accounts that are using any of your competitor’s solutions and target these accounts directly by clearly showing how your solution addresses well-known pain points.
- Opportunistic News Driven: A recent EOL notice or a bad review on a competitor solution is a great opportunity for you to reach out to accounts considering a new solution.
- Complementary Targeting: Identify the accounts that are using a complementary solution to yours and highlight how you can enhance their current solution with your own solution.
How Tech Insights Help You Score and Prioritize Your Best Leads:
It can be really tough to choose which leads accounts your marketing and sales teams should be giving the most attention to even with a clearly defined ICP. When executing on campaigns, reaching out to leads with relevant messaging takes quite a lot of time, so the last thing you want for your sales and marketing teams to be spending more of their time on figuring out which leads to select for your campaign. Luckily, you can make sure the right leads are prioritized automatically with the right technographics data embedded in your MAP or CRM.
Technographics data enables allows your sales and marketing teams to get in-depth insights on your leads that go beyond more general and typical lead scoring criteria like demographics, behavioral, firmographic data.
With the help of technographics data, your sales and marketing teams can dig even deep and prioritize leads depending on their technology footprint. For example, you can segment your leads depending on whether they are a late or early adopter of SaaS applications, whether they are using a complementary or competing technology solution to yours, and whether they are using legacy or obsolete solutions.
This unique information allows your sales and marketing teams to better understand your target audience and reach out to them with a highly relevant message that they are much more likely to respond as it directly addresses their pain points. Additionally, with the right leads prioritized properly, it also makes it much easier to create better sales and marketing alignment, deliver more MQLs, and convert leads to sales.
Popular Lead Scoring & Prioritization Use Cases:
You can easily ensure that your sales and marketing teams stay focused on following the leads that generate the most revenue by using technographics data to automatically score and prioritize your leads based on your ICP. The following are the most successful use cases for lead scoring and prioritization that our customers implemented using technographics data;
- Complementary Campaigns: score and prioritize leads that use a technology solution you enhance, and reach out to them with your value proposition.
- Competitive Displacement: boost scoring for leads using competitor hardware or software solutions and reach out to them with a message that clearly shows how your solution solves their challenges.
- Up-sell/Cross-sell: understand the complete technology environment of your leads and prioritize those that are using legacy solutions to your sales and marketing teams for automated outreach.
How Tech Intelligence Helps You Displace Competitors All Year Long:
You’ve probably invested quite a lot of time and money, if you’re a growing B2B technology organization, in developing, researching and testing your solution. And you’re well versed in exactly what it can do and can easily articulate how it solves the common pain points eloquently. Additionally, you have a good understanding of which competitors your solution competes well against and have relevant messaging that clearly showcase your differentiation.
But how do you put yourself in front of your target accounts that are using your competitor’s solutions so that you can win them over with your unique solution?
When you have technographics data for new and existing accounts, the answer to this question becomes much easy.
Technographics data provides you with the insights you need to find out exactly which technology solutions are installed at your accounts so you can accurately identify target accounts using competitive solutions and then throughout the year coordinate competitor displacement campaigns actively.
You can easily get this technology installation data for your current accounts and use the technographics intelligence data to find new accounts that are also using your competitor’s solutions. Actually, the sales and marketing teams who start using technographics data, usually learn that their total addressable market (TAM) for any given competitor is often 3-5x more they estimated earlier, giving them an even bigger revenue opportunity.
Competitive Takeaway Opportunities:
When you have technographics intelligence data in your MAP or CRM and that data is actionable and easily accessible, you can jump on opportunities faster like;
- Negative Reviews: a bad review on a competitor solution offers you an opportunity to highlight how your solution can help.
- Direct Displacement: when your competitors have well-known pain points, you can reach out to their existing accounts with the messaging that directly address their challenges and clearly illustrate how your solution solves them.
- Acquisitions and Mergers: offers an opportunity to engage with the account when they may be re-evaluating current technology solution purchases and looking for better alternatives.
- End of Life: announcements regarding certain software or hardware no longer be supported or being discontinued enables you to enter the conversation as a potential replacement solution.
There are several opportunities that surface throughout the year that can help you dislodge your competitors, however, only if your accounts and leads are enriched with tech intelligence, you’ll be able to jump on them quickly.
Make Digital Advertising Effective and Easy:
According to VPN Mentor, the top three complaints that the consumers had about online advertisements in 2019 were that there were irrelevant or annoying ads, too many ads, and intrusive ads. These complaints are the motivations behind ad blocking many times that for a digital advertiser is the worst nightmare. Additionally, digital advertising campaigns are only effective if you can successfully create engagement with your audience using relevant messaging and ad placement.
Targeted advertising can increase click-through rates by 670%, according to the American Marketing Association. The best way to successfully achieve this result as a B2B marketer is by using technographic intelligence data.
However, while firmographics data can help you a lot to narrow down your target audience, to really increase your prospect and customer engagement, grow campaign effectiveness, and generate more brand awareness you need technographics data.
The technology data reveals which technology solutions your target accounts have installed, helping you to target your digital display advertising even more to the exact target audience you’re trying to reach and engage with. This means, while maximizing your ad spend on the right target accounts, you can launch highly relevant and much more effective campaigns.
You can quickly run multiple ad programs when you’re able to easily use technographic intelligence to segment your digital advertising, including;
- Complementary: highlighting how you enhance their existing solution, run display ads targeting users of solutions that are interoperable with yours.
- Competitive: target your digital ads directly to your competitor’s customers, showing them exactly how you address well-known pain points.
- Up-sell/ Cross-sell: show relevant up-sell/cross-sell ads to the users of a specific software or hardware technology solution.
Conclusion:
Modern buyers are more educated than ever before, there’s no way around it. That’s where technographics come into play. Combined with firmographic and demographic data, technographics data gives a 360-degree view of B2B sales prospects and customers. it no longer takes two or three conversations, when using technographics data, to clearly understand where a prospect might be in the buying journey. Instead, long before speaking to a prospect or customer, sales reps can access this data. This helps with more productive conversations and more customized solutions.`
