What is Technographic Data? How to Use It

A common difficulty for B2B marketers is choosing which accounts to target. How can you tell if someone will fit in? How can you know who is in the market? Is there a current answer that satisfies their requirements? If so, do they approve of it?

The gold mine of knowledge your marketing and sales teams need is technographic data, also known as technographics. It is the data that reveals what software and hardware solutions your prospects use, how they use them, and their willingness to explore new technology.

This guide will teach you everything you need to know about technographic data so that you may start communicating with your ideal prospects earlier, increase sales and customer retention, and realize your ABM goals.

What is Technographic Data?

Technographics, also known as technographic data, is knowledge about the technological stack of an organization. This includes its existing tools, usage, implementation specifics, and adoption rates. It’s also a crucial component of account intelligence, which provides your marketing and sales teams with general insights. 

These insights can help them better understand accounts and leads.

The challenge? With context, this technographic’s definition is clear.

Let’s start by discussing what technographics aren’t:

Demographics data

The main focus of demographic data is information about people. This data tells you how many people work for a particular company. What points of contact are there? What’s next, and how have company sizes and employee compositions changed? Although it is essential for identifying new leads and creating the first marketing campaigns. This information provides no understanding of how technology is used.

Firmographic data

Firmographic data includes details about businesses’ sizes, product lines, markets they serve, overall revenues, and even their physical locations. Although firmographics data excludes technological indicators or measures, it can be used to construct focused campaigns that stimulate B2B sales interest.

So, what precisely is technographic data? Simply said, it’s the practical application of knowledge about a prospective customer’s technological stack. 

Technographic data includes everything from the infrastructure and network tools they employ to the applications they like and the size of adoption of those applications.

When handled properly, technographic data can assist businesses in matching their product offers to demands for digital transformation.

Worth mentioning? Pure technographic data and social technographic data can be distinguished from one another. Social technographic data focuses on the consumption and usage of social media technologies within an enterprise. On the contrary, technographic data speaks to the use of software, hardware, and networking technologies within an organization.

Why You Should Care About Technographics?

There is no stopping evolution, which is a problem.

Either you evolve, or you fall behind.

Whether you run a startup, an established brand wanting to identify niche personalities, or a business that depends on precise prospecting data to drive your marketing, evolving with data to gain a competitive advantage is essential.

The idea of technographics can now be realized after spending years in the background of its siblings.

Furthermore, there is no denying that the current data explosion is astounding.

Statista estimates that in 2018 cloud data centres generated 10.6 zettabytes of global IP traffic. That is 10,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10, 676 sextillion bytes.

Remember that the last three years alone saw the creation of almost 90% of the world’s data and that by the end of the year, each person would produce 1.7 gigabytes of data per second.

The entire ramifications of everything going on here are just incomprehensible. 

However, one immediate effect of all this is that the corporate ecology is changing, and a company’s capacity to develop will depend on its ability to use data.

The main issue nowadays for most marketers is to stand out from a constantly growing field of rivals.

We can find substantial evidence to support the assertion by examining the UK tech startup ecosystem. A recent survey by the professional services firm RSM found that approximately 12,000 software development enterprises were registered in 2018 alone.

In 2016, there were 3,874 MarTech options available. By the time that figure reached 6,829 in 2018, the market had almost doubled in size in just under two years.

This is likely the main problem that technographic abilities can help with.

Technographics allow for greater customer experience personalization by providing a deeper grasp of a potential customer’s technology stack. Those who offer a better customer experience will consistently prevail in a world where products and services are identical.

Applications of Technographic Data

Technographic data provides the following benefits to sales and marketing teams:

• Precise customer segmentation
• Account-Based Marketing
• Customer Success
• Competitor analysis
• Forecasting
• Optimizing sales efforts
• Improving sales and marketing conversations
• Expanding to new markets

Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

• Precise Customer Segmentation

You can categorize and rank prospects based on aspects of technology by segmenting your options, and you can then engage them using plays tailored to each segment.

• Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing’s throbbing heart is personalized, pertinent communications. Understanding the technology your prospects use will help you better grasp the problems they are trying to solve. You gain an edge over rivals by establishing yourself as a solution to such issues.

• Customer Success

Customer happiness directly contributes to maintaining predictable revenue growth by decreasing attrition and boosting upsells and cross-sells.

Technographics can indicate whether a client might be experimenting with a rival platform. Your customer success team should contact the customer to find out what issues they are trying to fix as soon as they receive that signal, which is an evident red alarm.

You might be able to keep the customer’s loyalty if you provide a remedy.

• Competitor Analysis

With technographics, examining what and to whom your competitors are selling is much simpler. You can use technographics to understand your competition’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and clients.

In addition to understanding which tools and platforms are often utilized by businesses in particular industries or of specific sizes, this enables you to triangulate methods to reach critical accounts.

• Forecasting

When a prospective client uses new technology, it’s an excellent indication that they:

• Have already seen or anticipate significant growth
• A team is reorganized or newly established.
• New management or something else has made it necessary to use new tools.
• It’s a clear indication that they are looking for solutions.

• Optimize Your Sales Efforts

Using technographic data, you can also determine which prospects are most closely linked with your ICP. You can prioritize outreach by doing this.

• Improve Sales and Marketing Conversations

Technographic data can help you be ready for any technology-related inquiries your prospects may have and gives salespeople the confidence to enquire independently.

With this degree of readiness, your sales representatives can serve as technology consultants who can advise clients on a course of action.

• Expand Into New Markets

You can find target accounts in untapped industries that employ a comparable technology stack and have a demand for your product by analyzing the customer technology stacks of both you and your competitors.

Technographics Scenarios

Let’s look at three potential business scenarios where technographic data can be employed.

When Launching an Email Campaign

Imagine that a business wishes to start an email campaign to convert leads. It’s frequently challenging to determine which audience will be responsive or which communications will be persuasive without technographic data. However, it offers many opportunities for conversation if you are aware of the tools and technology they are utilizing.

Scaling Your Customer Base

Startups must identify their target market. Here are some tips on how to effectively scale your business by using technographic in customer profiling:

Subscription-Based Service

Suppose you own a company that offers a service that improves upon competing goods. Technographics can show you which businesses already utilize tools you can enhance. Then, it can use these findings to filter them based on precise criteria to create a list of high-intent prospects that are worthwhile pursuing.

If your service relies on subscriptions, you can learn which of your rivals’ customers have contracts about to expire. To save time, effort, and resources, you may filter out prospects that need to meet the high intent or conversion criteria using technographic data.

How to Collect Technographic Data

Three main techniques exist for collecting technographic data:

1. Surveys

The staff at the target companies is the place to start for the most direct approach to collecting technographic data. Companies use phone or email surveys to gather data about how technology is embraced. The challenge? Many businesses are unwilling to offer particular usage data, even via email answer templates, and most organizations won’t respond to surveys made over the phone. Although this approach might yield some data on everyday use, it’s frequently more work than it’s worth.

2. Website Scraping

Website scraping tools retrieve particular data from corporate websites about businesses’ apps and services. Although this may yield more accurate findings than survey data and eliminate the need to cold call businesses. But, it still needs technical know-how to guarantee that tools gather and report the appropriate data. Additionally, website security settings may restrict the type and amount of data that may be collected, and the available data might be outdated.

3. Third-party Purchasing

The easiest way to acquire technographic data is to buy it from a reliable data collection company. Cloud-based SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions have quickly gained popularity. 

As a result, service providers and data analytics companies now have access to considerably more robust and trustworthy technographic data sets that interested parties may acquire.

There are some restrictions on this data collection, such as the requirement that personal data be anonymized to comply with national and international privacy laws. But, with the correct third-party provider, businesses can access vast amounts of valid technographic data.

It’s important to remember that not all providers are made equal. Others cannot provide real-time information, while some promise enormous databases but cannot deliver. A good bet? Do your homework before hiring any provider of technographic data.

How to Use Technographic Data

It’s time to put technographic data to use once you obtain it. Here are seven strategies your sales and marketing teams may use to make use of technographic data:

1. Enhanced Segmentation

It can be easy to make educated assumptions regarding client segmentation for marketers and sellers intimately aware of their markets. However, your consumer categories will be more accurate the more data you have to work with.

Particularly for B2B organizations, technographic data helps GTM teams segment their customer bases more precisely. This allows them to customize their marketing campaigns to meet their demands. Technographic data can also assist businesses in foreseeing the solutions that clients may require.

2. More Informed Sales Conversations

The first sales rule is to understand your customers. However, there is only so much information you can learn about prospects by reading about them in the media, exploring their websites, and connecting with them or their coworkers on LinkedIn. 

Before beginning a conversation with a decision-maker, sales teams benefit from using technographic data to prepare themselves better and feel more secure. Knowing a company’s tech stack in advance enables representatives to make appropriate plans and modify their messaging.

3. Increased prioritization

It can be overwhelming for marketing and sales teams to manage and prioritize account prospects. It is difficult to predict which candidates will convert, and not all will be successful. Technographic data reveals a customer’s degree of interest and purchasing power. It is one of the best predictors of whether or not an account is a good fit for your offering. Prioritization becomes more straightforward and more data-driven with this knowledge at hand.

4. Improved Conversion Rates

When sales teams know a prospect needs a solution and is prepared to buy, they are likelier to close agreements. And suppose those prospects hear a pitch entirely tailored to their needs. In that case, they might sign faster, reducing the back-and-forth and last-minute judgments that sales teams sometimes deal with. Technographic data shortens the sales cycle and improves the precision of total addressable market (TAM) calculations.

5. New Opportunities

Technographic data patterns can help you find new accounts that suit your ideal customer profile (ICP) by carefully looking for those patterns. If your business is preparing to introduce a new product, then technographic data can assist your sales staff in identifying a fresh set of suitable accounts.

6. Effective ABM Campaigns

Nowadays, account-based marketing is a very effective marketing tactic for good reasons. It is much more time and money-effective to identify a list of ideal consumers and target them with highly customized material than to send out mass emails and see who responds. However, the success of an ABM campaign depends on the quality of the data underlying its personalization. That’s where technographic data excels.

Technographic data is a crucial part of Account Intelligence, the magic ingredient that makes commercials, personalized emails, and other forms of outreach effective with potential consumers. Marketing professionals can create content to attract prospects’ interest by considering their present tech stack, expansion plans, and demand for new capabilities.

7. Better Customer Retention

It takes effort to attract new customers. It can be challenging to keep them. Ensuring your goods or services keep proving their worth is essential for customer retention. By giving your customer success teams knowledge of the tech stacks of prospects, they can better position them for success by using technographic data to target the proper leads in the first place.

Product teams can also benefit from paying attention to technographics, as it can provide them with ideas for new features that could lead to prospects for renewal and growth.

Who Uses Technographic Data and How Do They Use It?

Almost everyone who offers IT-related services or solutions already uses technographic data to some extent.

The majority of enterprise providers already base their marketing strategy on technographics. SMEs and startups are currently experiencing a strong upward curve in adoption.

Some of the best results occur when firms integrate technographics with purpose data.

You can learn what your customers or prospects are studying and whether they are in the purchase cycle using intent data derived through behavioral analysis of a company’s or person’s online research activity. You’ll be able to learn a lot that you may use to improve your sales and marketing strategies.

Businesses can achieve astonishing outcomes using technographic and intent data to guide their marketing approach.

The worth of technographic data is self-evident on the surface, but it is impossible to calculate its potential value. But one thing is sure: businesses who ignore the necessity and benefit of improved business intelligence capabilities will keep lagging behind those who do.

The Future of Technographic Data

Technographics won’t be going away anytime soon, it seems safe to assume.

Existing markets and ecosystems will continue to be disrupted by machine learning and AI, making them more vulnerable to and dependent on the manipulation of data and information.

There is every reason to expect technographics to become necessary in effective marketing tactics for every firm until we develop global artificial intelligence.

Wrapping Up

This article has emphasized that technographic capability is not an end. However, it is a crucial part of client and consumer involvement in the digital age.

Your sales and marketing team’s targeting efforts will be significantly enhanced once they have access to technographic data, and they will be able to customize communications to a degree that isn’t conceivable without it.

Please get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more about how we can use technographic data to help you grow.