In a data-driven world, insights of the technology used by your prospects can give you a great competitive advantage. If, for example, you offer a B2B software, it is essentially an awesome head start for you to know which other systems are already in use in this company.

Whether you’re looking to improve your company’s account based marketing strategies will relevant sales intelligence, or simply trying to better understand best practices around customer acquisition, we hope that this article helps you understand why you should be using technographic data.

In this post we’ll tell you what technographic data is, and how technographics can help you boost sales, improve marketing ROI and elevate company performance.

What is Technographic Data Intelligence

Just like how demographics and firmographics provide a profile of the person or company to be described, technographics gives youo a detailed picture of the person or company’s IT landscape. It is useful to identify your prospect’s technology usage patterns, purchasing behaviour or their attitude towards a certain technology product or brand.

It answers the questions below

• What hardware and software they are using?
• How are they implementing and utilizing their varying tech stacks and platforms?
• What are they likely to purchase next?

Do I Really Need Technographic Data

You cannot resist evolution. You either adapt. Or you Perish. Global IP data traffic is predicted to stand at 278108 petabytes (source: Statista). This translates to 2.78108e+20 bytes. That’s a massive amount of data! The sales and marketing ecosystem is continuously expanding and your revenue growth will depend on your company’s ability to leverage data.

Companies spend over $250 billion per year on software, so it’s important to keep track of what they’re using and how, so you can know which solutions you should pitch to them. With a better understanding of a prospect’s technology stack, technographics will help greater personalization of the customer journey.

How Can Sales and Marketing Use Technographic Data

Finding prospects that meet your Ideal Customer Profile can be a tedious process, but technographics make it a little easier.

Improve SDR Productivity

Studies suggest SDRs spend almost 63% of their time doing mundane operational tasks like accumulating contact data rather than actually selling. Wouldn’t it be great for your revenue growth if you could just get a list of the prospects that already have the technology needed to use your product or service? For example, if you sold products that integrate with Salesforce, wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of only those companies that already use Salesforce already? You won’t have to fight your way through a list of companies that only might have what you’re looking for, wasting marketing budget and hours on cold calling that actually go nowhere.

Boost Marketing ROI

Once you are aware of your prospect’s tech stack, you can optimize you content and messaging for first contact. You will also be able to target companies based on their tech stack, and create ads/messaging/copies or emails that match what your prospects wish to hear. You learn more about your prospects and you can spend more time chasing the right leads who are most likely to buy. This way, you can drastically improve your chances of getting a positive response, because it demonstrates you have taken the efforts to understand their challenges.

Where Can You Find Technographic Data

Listed below are tried and tested methods to collect technographic data:

1. Ask for It

Cold Calling and Email still works. But, they are often unreliable, time consuming and extremely counterproductive.

2. Digital Crawling and Data Scraping

Data scraping can help read information about the IT landscape of your prospects. It can discover key information by extracting code from websites. But, it is highly likely that this data will be stale and of no use.

3. Buy Technographic Data

This is the easiest way to procure usable and relevant technographic data. There are many reliable vendors in this space, like SMARTe. Each data provider has their own technology install base that provides technographic data on millions of companies and technologies. Gain categorized intelligence with insights on your competitor’s customers and companies similar to them. To know why some of the world’s best companies rely on SMARTe for technographic intelligence, click here.

CREATE NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO SELL YOUR PRODUCT

Get actionable data on direct or indirect competitors, partners/alliances, technology landscape of named accounts, and more. Gather intelligence about what existing customers think about your products & services and what they are likely to buy next.

MUCH MORE THAN JUST TECH INSIGHTS

SMARTe sources new companies and contacts using custom search functionality. Get contact-level insights and refresh your data in real-time to boost your lead generation. 

PROSPECTING ON A WHOLE NEW LEVEL

Create new opportunities to cross-sell, up-sell, and convert customers to your product. Know your competitor’s technology landscape with a data-driven approach. Competitive landscape includes multiple technologies, services, platforms, company size, location, industry and other parameters.

It is critical that you be able to layer both your firmographic and technographic data together so you can get an in-depth understanding of your prospects. Your sales development representative’s time will be spent more productively and they will see higher conversion rates from their sales engagements.

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