Technographics: The Complete Guide To Understanding & Using Technographic Data

To put it in the simplest terms, technographics are 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 gives you an insight into the technology and tools used by your target accounts. This allows you to effectively market to the accounts that are most likely to convert based on their current technology stack.

Like demographics or firmographics, technographics is a market segmentation tool that answers questions like - What specialized tools is an enterprise using? Are these tools cloud-based or not? What kind of hardware is being used to run these tools?

In the sections that follow we will see how exactly technographics are changing the way businesses make money.

How Does Technographics Help?

1. Precise Customer Segmentation - Technographics isn’t just about getting new customers and engaging more prospects. When you use technographics on your existing customers, you can effectively create a detailed image of their technology stacks and get a better understanding of how you can elevate your pitch and/or product in order to effectively match your value proposition to serve their indirect needs as well.

   This not only helps with customer retention and providing a more personalized customer experience but also makes it easier for you to focus on highly granulated customer segments to expand your client roster

   Technographic business intelligence tools allow you to engage with the right target accounts based on immediate technological requirements. Just being in the know about the most likely-to-convert accounts makes it doubly easier for you to figure out which campaigns to focus on and puts you a few steps ahead of the competition by default. With technographic segmentation you can also build more reliable and relevant marketing messages.

   When you reach the right people with the right messaging, you can expect to delight your customers right from the get go. This enables you to increase the potential of driving more prospects through the sales funnel and engage with your accounts more effectively.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Technographics At Work

Let’s take a look at a few technographic segmentation examples to understand how technographic data can be applied to different business challenges.

1. 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.

   In this case, they can start by identifying prospects that are using tools which integrate with their solutions. Next, find customers that are using solutions offered by their competitors. After this, they can go deeper into the data and identify specific decision-makers in the matrix who will be more likely to respond positively to messaging based on our knowledge of their technology stack.

   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.

2. Another example of technographics helping enterprises move the needle could be to provide accurate data to profile customers for more effective sales. 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.

   First, use technographic data to build a complete 360 degree view of key accounts in your list.

   Next, get additional information like fiscal cycles and the finances of the target accounts in order to gain context and timing your interactions for maximum impact.

   Now you can get details of the best decision makers to approach based on their title, location, and influence to gauge which accounts the sales team should be placing on high priority.

   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.

Technographic data and technographic segmentation can be used to augment your sales and marketing efforts -

These are just a few scenarios where technographic segmentation can be used. Depending on the specific needs of your enterprise, technographic data is a gold mine of insights which can be used to enable your business to do more, and do better.