Technographics:

When you’re aggressively working on cornering your target market, insights that enable you to discover your competitors’ customers and help you target high-intent prospects or accounts (that already work with integration partners/have a need for your product) can rapidly accelerate growth.

But how do you get these key insights, and is getting them at scale even possible? The answer is yes, thanks to technographics.

The act of determining buying or purchase intent and segmenting prospects into different “intent buckets” isn’t a new concept. However, what’s changed over the recent past is the way in which we capture data to deliver these insights.

This page focuses on helping you understand what technographic data is and how you can leverage the same to level your playing field.

What is Technographic data?

Technographics is a portmanteau of the words “technology” and “demographics”.

To understand it better, let us take a look at its definition.

Simply put, technographic data is defined as data-driven insights that help businesses identify which accounts are most likely to convert based on the knowledge of their current technology stack.

In essence, technographic data allows you to understand the technology and tools used by your target accounts. Good technographic data also tells you when a customer started using a particular software, and when their contract is expected to renew, in addition to just giving you a high-level overview of a company’s tech stack.

This allows you to effectively market to the accounts that are most likely to convert based on their current technology stack.

How is Technographic Data Collected?

Now that we know what technographic data means, it is important to understand how this is collected. There are three major ways in which technographic data is typically collected.

1. Survey

This is one of the most direct methods of collecting data. Here, you tap the source directly. The best source to target is the staff at the company whose technology data you want to collect. With the help of phone or email surveys, companies can collect information on what technology is utilized, set-up, and used to boost their B2B efforts.

However this is tough since not all companies will respond to cold-call surveys or share the information via an email or a form. In addition to that, surveys require more time and effort and aren’t a surefire way of obtaining data at scale.

2. Website Scraping

Crawling or scraping from the web means scraping publicly available information from websites and the source code of webpages can help you obtain data around the software used by a company.

This method produces significantly more accurate results and helps you gather data at scale as compared to surveys. However it requires you to build or use technology that will collect this information efficiently.Tools for website scraping are used for obtaining data from corporate websites. With this you will be able to obtain data regarding the apps and services used by the business.

Website crawling often produces more accurate results as compared to surveys, however it requires technical adroitness to make sure that the tools are collecting and reporting relevant data.

One of the drawbacks of this method are the security protocols that websites use which may limit the type of data collected. The data collected can also be out of date if the website is not regularly updated.

3. Third-party Purchasing

This is probably the most direct method of obtaining technographic data. With the use of cloud-based SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions, these service providers will have better access to more vigorous and attested technographic data sets.

Like any method, this has its own share of limitations. Here, personal data needs to be anonymized in order to be compliant with both local and global privacy laws. The best way to implement this method is to remember that not all data providers are equal. Your best bet is to do deep research prior to contracting any technographic data provider.

By recognizing which technologies are being onboarded by your leads or prospects, you will be able to develop more successful segmentation, provide personalized outreach which in turn can lead to more closed wins. Below is an snapshot on how you can use technographic data:

Precise Customer Segmentation

Technographic data provides a clear idea of your prospect’ s technology stack. By doing so you can segment your prospects effectively.

Segmenting your prospects using technographic data allows you to prioritize leads that will result in driving the right prospects through your sales funnel and engage with them successfully.

Food for thought: Want to make sure your prospects are segmented correctly?

Using an automation tool to set this up will help you curate your prospects into the right buckets so that you can nurture them accordingly.

Once your prospects are segmented into the right buckets, your sales teams can direct their efforts towards them by developing and using personalized pitches.

Account Based Marketing

Almost every successful B2B venture has account-based marketing to thank for a large chunk of their revenues. The biggest advantage of using technographics for account-based marketing is being able to deliver a hyper-personalized sales experience that cements a deeper connection with your prospects, which can be the make or break factor when it comes to B2B sales.

With all the marketing automation tools available in the market, it’s not hard to focus on a particular segment. However, if you can go to a prospect knowing exactly what technologies they are using; you can position your products or services by truly understanding their challenges, you definitely have an advantage over your competitors’ ABM tactics.

Such technographic data can help sales teams create more impactful pitches and enable marketing to run a sustained omnichannel experience. It also boosts conversion rates by providing a holistic view of all technologies in use by a prospect and helps you identify opportunities to close more deals.

Customer Success

Whether you’re in the B2B space or the B2C space, today’s marketplace requires you to be right on top when it comes to customer satisfaction. This key factor is directly responsible for generating substantial results and improving the efforts of your acquisition activities.

However, not every company is able to deliver the customer experience that they can potentially deliver in order to outclass their competitors and boost customer loyalty. In the business world, this becomes a differentiating factor that you can gain immensely from, with the help of technographics.

For example, Technographics can help you deliver a well-rounded customer experience by enabling sales and marketing teams to identify specific triggers in order to decide exactly what, where, and how to market and sell their product or service.

Competitor Analysis

Analyzing what your competitors are selling and to whom they are selling becomes a whole lot easier with the help of technographics. Since you know which technology and tools your accounts are using, you can find out exactly where your competitors' products are being used. This allows you to strategize more effectively when competing for key accounts in the marketplace.

Personalizing Entire Customer Journeys

Technographic segmentation can elevate not just your sales numbers but your entire customer journey from start to finish. Technographic data can be used quite effectively to optimize your inbound marketing strategies from lead generation to lead nurturing to finally converting them to active users.

Forecast and Time Prospect Needs

Foreseeing when businesses implement specific hardware and software acts as a signal to reach out to them. Technographic data takes the guessing out of play and arms you with all the information to create a specific outreach to these businesses.

Optimize Your Sales Efforts

In a world of eat or be eaten, technographic data can be your saviour. By understanding your leads and existing clients technology needs and usage, you can streamline your pipeline to prioritize better fit leads and develop better outreach campaigns.

Improve Sales Conversations

With better fit prospects identified, you can now work on improving the sales conversations you have with them. Fueled with crisp and clear technographic data can help you predict the questions from your prospects and be better prepared for the same.

Infiltrate New Markets

With technographics, it is possible to identify and expand into newer markets. How? Analyzing your prospects’ and your customers’ tech stack and comparing it to other similar audiences can enable you to discover target accounts in unrelated industries that use a similar technology stack and have a need for your product. Hence you arrive at a new industry which houses untapped potential of leads for you to grab.

Improve Marketing Conversations

With technographics, it is possible to identify and expand into newer markets. How? Analyzing your prospects’ and your customers’ tech stack and comparing it to other similar audiences can enable you to discover target accounts in unrelated industries that use a similar technology stack and have a need for your product. Hence you arrive at a new industry which houses untapped potential of leads for you to grab.

Let’s take a look at a few technographic segmentation examples to understand how technographic data can be needed in different business scenarios you might encounter.

When Launching an Email Campaign

Let’s say a company wants to launch an email campaign targeted at converting more prospects. Without technographic data, getting the attention of your audience in an email is a tricky task. However, if you know exactly what tools and technology they are using it opens up many possibilities of starting a conversation that would keep them engaged.

Food for thought: By doing this, the company puts itself in a position to effectively generate high-quality, and high-intent inbound leads that have the potential to move quickly through the sales funnel. It can also put the sales team in a comfortable position by enabling them to tap into their networks to create greater recall for the brand during the outreach phase.

Scaling Your Customer Base

Startups need to be highly prepared when they step out into the marketplace. Without the right information in hand, scaling your customer base is not an easy task. In order to get new customers, the first step would be to get them interested in your start-up. Here’s how you can use technographics in customer profiling.

Food for thought: These simple steps can result in almost 5x growth in demos and enquiries, while only having to spend 3x less time than a traditional sales funnel on research and focusing on even more key accounts.

Subscription Based Service

Let’s say, you’re a business selling a product that supplements other products in the market. Technographics can give you data regarding specific consumers or employees across different organisations who have purchased a product, that your product can further supplement. It can then filter these results based on highly specific variables and give you a list of high intent prospects that are worth pursuing and investing your resources into.

If you’re a subscription based service then you could easily obtain the list of clients of your competitors, whose subscriptions are expiring. With the help of technographic data, you can filter out those results that do not qualify as high intent or convertible prospects, thereby saving a huge chunk of time, effort and resources in the process.

With the right kind of segmentation being put into place, you can make use of lead scoring and data enrichment to accurately understand each customer’s individual needs and personalize their journey right from the first moment they interact with you. By gaining insight into the kind of technology an account is using you can see to what extent they are spending on technology in a particular space.

For example, you can gauge if your accounts are likely to spend more on marketing based on whether they are using free tools or tools with paid subscriptions. Since technographics tell you exactly which tool they are using, you can accurately gauge whether they will be more or less likely to buy your product at its current price.

Food for thought: With technographic data at your fingertips, you will have a much stronger understanding of a lead’s technology stack. This allows you to tailor your marketing and content strategies to offer them information and content that they will find helpful at each stage of their buying journey.

Educate

Provide a prospect enough information to educate them on the benefits of using a solution like the one you are selling. This adds to your top-of-the-funnel traffic which, eventually trickles down to actual buyers as you guide them through to the next stage.

Complement

If you identify accounts that are using technology which integrates with your offering, you are better placed to sell your solution over a competitor whose solution doesn’t do the same. Targeting these users helps you leverage their existing technology to complement your own.

Compete

If you clearly understand what your competitors’ offerings are, you can weave together a strong case which highlights the benefits of your solution over theirs. By creating a user journey based on your competitor, you can focus solely on your USPs and drive home the point with greater impact.

With so many new vendors flooding the market, it’s imperative to make sure that you choose one who can provide accurate and updated information at all times. A few factors that affect the quality of your technographics data are:

Here are some attributes that you must consider when picking the right buying intent tool for your business:

Accuracy

Ensuring that the information you receive is correct and shows the true technology stack that’s in use.

Recency

The data is refreshed frequently to reflect any new changes and prevent teams from pursuing ineligible leads.

Scale

Probability and numbers play a big part in closing deals; your data should be voluminous and granulated to target markets with efficiency.

Ease Of Integration

Introducing new data to your existing systems should not affect the status quo negatively. The data you get should be usable by your team without disrupting the utility of tools and processes that you already have.

Historical Repositories

Historical data can provide deep insights into market trends and help identify multiple factors for better conversions.

Before we delve into how to use them side by side , let us take a look at what Demographics and Pyschoigraphics are.

Demographics

Demographic segmentation categorizes the target market based on specific characteristics such as age, education, gender, location, marital status, location and more. This type of segmentation allows businesses to understand their leads or prospects better.

Demographic data is usually the most easily available data, since most individuals make it available to others on social media.

Typically, at any organization there are multiple stakeholders involved when it comes to the decision making process. Demographics helps you identify these stakeholders and curate a marketing and sales strategy that will fit these individuals.

In most cases, a one-size fits all sales and marketing campaigns will not work since what works for decision maker A might not work for decision maker B.

Food for thought: A holistic picture about the demographics of the decision makers will allow for better campaigns for each group and in turn will fetch the results you desire.

Psychographics

With this segmentation technique, prospects or leads are divided into various segments based on the following characteristics -

• 1. Personality
• 2. Values
• 3. Belief
• 4. Lifestyle
• 5. Attitudes
• 6. Interests
• 7. Social Class

Psychographic data adds to the quantitative data derived from demographics to create a panoramic view of your leads or prospects along with their buying potential and habits.

With today’s social media and online user activity, a lead’s demographic and psychographic characterization can be developed. For example, just by “liking” a few posts or pages on Twitter or Facebook can potentially provide information about your political orientation, everyday life, hobbies, and more.

One of the biggest advantages for companies is by using these data garnered from social media, they can create emotionally intuitive outreach campaigns to precisely anticipate their customer’s needs.

For example, consider the organic food industry, where a specific set of customers are targeted to receive various promotional and beneficial outreach messages.

Most customers for this industry are interested in learning about how the ingredients are grown and used in preparing the final product and more such beneficial tips for a wholesome life.

Food for thought: Back in the day, companies were forced to rely on their own historical data, however with big data there are now many psychographic tools that businesses can use to generate this kind of information in a heartbeat.

How to Use Demographics, Technographics and Psychographics Side By Side

Let us use an example to understand this. An organic food company ABC has developed a new heart healthy snack XYZ. ABC is now interested in marketing and selling their product. They have done prior research and are able to identify the age group, and location (demographics data) with which this product would resonate (for example: 25-35 years old and the location being the United States). They are also able to identify that this snack will appeal to customers who have a specific lifestyle (psychographic data), and are interested in their overall wellness.

Now to expand their market, they decide to identify various companies that use employee benefits program software which has fitness and wellness components as part of their benefits.

Now, after identifying the companies that employ this technology, company ABC can reach out to them to see if they want to incorporate their new snack as part of their fitness and wellness benefit program they provide their employees.

Incorporating all these data points allows you to create a better sales and marketing strategy for your product and your company as a whole. This combination of data can also help predict how your customers will behave in the future.

The art and science of balancing demographics, psychographics and technographics data has definitely become the need of the hour.

Creating a Technographics-Driven Future

With everything explained in this page, it is quite apparent that technographic data is here to stay and is not disappearing anytime soon.

Business intelligence tools that incorporate technographics, demographics, firmographics and psychographics have become a must have for businesses around the world.

The synergy created by these data types are limitless. If you haven’t made the change to incorporate technographic data into your business, it is time to make this change.