What is Technographic Data and Why it Matters for Your Business

In the present age, technology is a catalyst for companies to drive revenue expansion. Every business is powered by technology. The tools and apps that businesses use provide insight into their technology purchasing habits, how they work, the issues they encounter, and what technology they will purchase next. As an acknowledgment of this data-driven phenomenon, technographics aim to segment technology at a granular level into several parameters. For technology suppliers, technographics serve as a lens into the world.

If you want to know what that indicates and how to apply it, look no further. We have got all the information you need.

What is technographic data?
Why do you need technographic data?
How to use technographic data?
How to create a targeted segment using technographics?
How to identify and reach your potential customers using technographic data?
Access a wide coverage of technographic data with SalesIntel
How does SalesIntel provide you with technographic data?

What is Technographic Data?

Technographics is the next step in developing market research after Demographics, Firmographics, and Psychographics. As much as demographics determine people’s behaviors, technographics determine the technologies and software used by your prospects. With technographic data, you can gain an in-depth understanding of the technology stack used by businesses and their potential plan to buy technological solutions in the future.

What are Technographics in Marketing?

Technographics is understanding the technology and hardware used by your potential clients. It helps you personalize your messaging based on technographic data while approaching email marketing or cold calling.

Why Do You Need Technographic Data?

A data provider offering you technographic data as a value-add might not excite you if you don’t know the role technographic data plays in prospecting. This might be because you’re not sure about the need for having technographic data in your database. With the increased use of technology, technographic data can turn out to be a vital prospecting tool. In fact, Forbes outlined that 70% of companies either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one.

Technographic data can help you to learn more about:

Hardware or software applications used by your prospects.
Remarketing – have they incorporated remarketing or not?
What are they using – marketing stack or marketing automation?

Imagine a situation where companies A and B have established similar target markets when selling their product or service.

Both businesses utilize firmographic data and demographic data (personal names, personal addresses, social media handling, etc.) to attract their audiences. Nevertheless, company A has access to the technographic data of the audience. With this resource, Company A is aware of the tools that their prospects use. They also have access to the purpose served by these tools and how long they are using the tools. It becomes clear that Company A now has the upper hand and is in a stronger position to convert these prospects.

Since both companies began on common grounds, Company A is a clear winner!

How to Use Technographic Data in Your B2B Marketing

By understanding the technology tools you have deployed and the technologies spent by your customers, you will be more successful in your outreach targeting which can lead to more conversions and closed-win results. Here’s a short snapshot of how you can use technographic data for your business growth:

1. Identify Gaps, Challenges, and Opportunities

You can study the tech stack of your prospect as a way of understanding their weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities. Let’s consider that your company develops a platform or an add-on that can be integrated with Salesforce. You more than likely would like to target prospects using Salesforce. Additionally, you can also identify if they are using your competitor’s product or service. This information can help your sales reps prepare and tailor their sales pitch before connecting with prospects.

2. Focused Segmentation

By analyzing your current customers, you can build a broader view of their technology stack and the methods they use to solve issues related to your value proposition.

For example, you may notice that most of your customers use marketing automation tools such as HubSpot and Act-On. Although this information shows which brands they have an association with, it is also an indication of their budget.

How?

Marketing automation is a big investment both in time and in money. If you compare both the tools, each one of them has unique points of differentiation in terms of features and usage. So, you can identify the priorities of your prospects based on the tool they use. These tools also indicate how serious they are about their marketing. Technographic data can also reflect the size of the organization and how advanced its marketing and technology teams are.

3. Customize Your Content Marketing With Technographics

You can use technographics to tailor your content to fit the technology stack of your prospects, which would make it more relevant to them. For example, you can identify the channels your prospects use, the tech challenges they might face, and even the things that do not affect them. This helps you share more information about how to use the technology and tools they are using with insider information to solve problems.

With technographic data, a marketer can refine the entire inbound marketing funnel to better serve the lead by using the right segmentation. Top, medium, or bottom-funnel content can be promoted based on the customer’s technology use. If your prospects are using your competitors’ tools or any other complementary tool, you can mold your content accordingly.

4. Prioritizing Leads for Best Sales Opportunities

When you create a deeper customer profile based on firmographic and technographic data, you can prioritize and distribute targeted leads through your marketing and sales teams.

Lead prioritization is where you differentiate sales qualified leads from those that are unlikely to convert. You can create a richer profile of those high-quality leads by the prioritization of technographic data sets.

Now combine your technographic data with intent data, and you have an automated way to prioritize your leads more robustly. This helps your sales reps who don’t have time to spend on finding accounts that have the best opportunities. They are handed over on a silver plate due to sales automation.

5. Using Technographics for Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has been the major focus of many B2B organizations. 48% of businesses consider ABM an effective marketing strategy. Digging further into the organizations that have the greatest influence on your business offers a more customized and personalized interface with targeted contacts which helps develop a strong relationship with your prospects.

Due to its highly focused nature, ABM is extremely cost-effective. In the B2B domain, casting a large net has become less successful than it used to be. With an effective ABM strategy, you can talk directly to your prospect on a one-on-one basis. This is also where technographic data can be an effective instrument to help personalize your communication and keep it relevant and engaging.

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Wondering how exactly you can use technographic data for prospecting and lead generation? Great! We can show you how to identify prospects based on their technographic data while filtering down to individual personas who have recently shown an intent to buy.

Schedule a SalesIntel Demo

How to Create a Targeted Segment Using Technographics?

Market segmentation is desired by every marketer and sales manager in order to present a more realistic picture of their consumer base. However, one of the most critical issues of B2B organizations is identifying and profiling consumer attributes and behaviors through the segmentation process.

There are numerous options for segmenting accounts to target for marketing campaigns or sales activity. So, how can you simplify, sharpen, and increase the effectiveness of segmenting? Data.

B2B marketers gain greatly from technological segmentation. Technographic data can help you construct firmographic profiles, identify trouble points, and enhance customized marketing initiatives. Regardless of industry, many businesses now rely on their technology stack to fuel growth, competitiveness, customer interactions, and more.

If you work in the B2B sector, it’s crucial to understand how technographic data can help you target the most qualified audience for your business.

How to Identify and Reach Your Potential Customers Using Technographic Data?

Now is the time to look for companies that use specific products or providers that correspond to your ideal customer. Perhaps you want to identify companies that use a competitor, or perhaps you simply want to find companies that use Salesforce.

You can define, filter, and search the exact contact data you want using SalesIntel, knowing that they are already qualified to be clients.

For instance, you can look for businesses that utilize VMware as a vendor. If there is a general topic on which you want to narrow your search. You can also search by category, such as Communications Management – Email. To locate the best-qualified contact information for your needs, use one or all three technographic fields.

Once you understand your prospects’ technological stack, you can adapt your marketing campaigns for the first point of contact. By customizing your message to the specific demands of the consumer, you increase the likelihood of a positive response by demonstrating that you have taken the time to analyze their present issues.

Here’s a video that explains how you can navigate, and find qualified leads right in the SalesIntel database.

Access a Wide Coverage of Technographic Data With SalesIntel

Knowing which hardware, software, tools, and applications a company uses can enable B2B marketers and sales professionals to take a focused approach and save a lot of time. However, to ensure that you make the most of technographic data, your data provider should have wide coverage of technographic data.

SalesIntel has excelled in this area. You get every detail your company requires for exponential growth. This widens your prospecting options while keeping the focus on your ideal customer fit. You can find more information here.

How Does SalesIntel Provide You with Technographic Data?

SalesIntel provides its customers with the most accurate and reliable technographic data in the industry. Technographic data along with other valuable data sets like buyer intent, and firmographic data, helps our clients have the best view of the entire B2B purchasing landscape.

SalesIntel’s technographic data, with its innovative, intuitive taxonomy, is built to best service modern go-to-market practices in the B2B world. Our proprietary technographic data icomes from 15 years of first-party B2B account data collection experience, continuous input of over 2,000 human research-on-demand experts supporting tens of thousands of customer surveys each year, and our patented AI technology.

With more than 16,500 unique technology products across 22M companies, and over 225M technographic data points into our technographic classification, we have one the most accurate data available in the industry. Our 2000 strong human research team continues to supports routine technographic data updates, including the addition of new technologies on an ongoing basis. With technographic data updates available to our clients within days, instead of the months and years which is typical of ageing technographic data sources with many of the vendors in the space, our clients have a clear competitive edge with us.

Through this SalesIntel feature, you can find businesses that directly use products or vendors that fit your ideal audience. This feature also grants you the ability to find companies that use a competitor, or companies that just use Salesforce.

We have quality data sets that you can identify, filter, and scan exactly the contact data that you want with the assurance that you are finding a qualified customer prospect. Search companies use technographic filters to find organizations based on which vendors they may use. The more filters you add, the more qualified the prospects you get with SalesIntel.

Example:

Search for businesses that use HubSpot as a CRM
Then filter your search by category such as “Communication Management – Email”
You can further narrow down your search using sub-categories.
Add filters to reflect the types of contacts you want at these companies. For example, VP or Director of Marketing.
Then hit the “Contacts” radio button to expose relevant contacts that work at these companies.

Try it for yourself.