Whether it’s to monitor marketing or to keep track of customers, technology in B2B sales these days cannot be escaped. The technologies that companies use leave digital footprints, so-called technographics, that can help you as a salesperson understand their identity or future direction.
The decisions companies make regarding technology can reveal useful account insights on prospects’ intentions, their priorities and the way they want to run their operations. Using technographic data in sales prospecting refers to salespeople’s attempts to better understand their prospects by analyzing their technology stacks.
Modern sales professionals in forefront use insights from both firmographic and technographic data when defining their Ideal Customer Profile and doing sales prospecting. In a recent blog post, we dug deeper into what firmographics is.
This article makes up the fourth chapter of our 60-page ebook The Ultimate Guide to Sales Prospecting. Here we explain what technographics is all about and how you as a salesperson can use it to find the most promising accounts to go after.
Smarter data collection provides better technographics
Back in the day, several vendors provided basic technographic data about companies, but it was difficult to do at scale because the data collection process was manual. Junior analysts interviewed executives and tried to collect as much information as possible about the tools and applications companies used. Recently, several software providers, including Vainu, have started to collect this type of information automatically by systematically indexing the company websites.
What is technographics?
Technographics includes a number of categories such as marketing automation, e-commerce platforms, customer feedback management, application tracking systems, live chats, event management and many more.
Let's showcase this with an example: When California-based information technology company Synopsys. When they released a new e-book, the campaign page for that e-book provides a lot of useful insights. Researching that page, we can determine Synopsys does systematic large-scale content marketing (they use Eloqua), they try to systematically improve conversion rates (they use Crazy Egg for A/B testing) and that they are also willing to advertise their content (they use Facebook Pixel). They also believe in account-based marketing and web personalization because they use vendors from those categories (Demandbase and Adobe Target).
Why is this data useful for prospecting purposes?
For some vendors, the value is crystal clear without further explanation. Are you working for a software company that provides handy integrations with other software platforms? Targeting companies that use those other platforms often have a higher conversion rate than targeting their counterparts that use platforms without integration options. An agency providing content marketing services most likely wants to segment their prospects based on how much companies already invest in content marketing today.
Artificial intelligence can help salespeople uncover correlations that would be very difficult to understand with human brainpower alone.
Sometimes technographic data can act as important proxy for things and needs that are seemingly unrelated to the technology. For example, here at Vainu we systematically target companies that use modern marketing automation solutions even though we are in a separate vertical. We have recognized that companies operating with marketing automation platforms tend to have a certain level of technical sophistication. They are usually also systematically trying to improve their key performance indicators both in marketing and sales departments.
Artificial intelligence can also help salespeople uncover correlations that would be very difficult to understand with human brainpower alone.
Finally
Modern salespeople tailor their sales pitches not only based on firmographic data but also based on a technographic profile of the prospect. When you do it systematically, this leads to more meaningful discussions with prospects because you've already done parts of the discovery and needs analysis before the first initial engagement with the customer.
Do you want to know more about how you can take your sales prospecting to the next level using insights from real-time firmographic and technographic data? Schedule a free 30-minute demo with one of our product specialists.
