How B2B SaaS Companies Get Sassy: Using Technographic Data to Identify the Best Prospects

Think about how you go about prioritizing and segmenting accounts. What things come to mind? Most of us in B2B would have no problem listing the firmographic data about our target prospects, things like revenue range, number of employees, location, and industry. For most of us in revenue marketing, these characteristics are what drive our understanding of the makeup of our target accounts.

Then there’s also demographic data, which identifies details about the people within our target markets, things like age ranges, income level, education, and gender to name a few. All of this data is helpful in segmenting a target list and prioritizing who to pursue in our Marketing and Sales efforts. But if you’re a SaaS company like us at Demandbase, you’ll also want to consider a third type of information about your prospects: technographic data.

What is technographic data?

Technographic data is information about the technologies that a company has adopted into its technology stack. When you harness this type of insight, you get to the heartbeat of what powers the business. From there you can glean how your own technology-based product or service can complement those technologies. We can use this understanding of our target accounts for deeper engagement and conversion rates of our target market.

Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2020) shows how the marketing technology landscape has changed over the years. It boasts roughly 8000 technologies in the marketplace. (That’s a 5233% growth since 2011!)

With the landscape growing so considerably to meet the needs of how we do business, it’s more important now than ever to understand what the tech stacks of our target markets look like to ensure we’re prioritizing the right accounts.

Putting technographic data to use

There are a number of ways to leverage technographic data in Marketing and Sales efforts, but to keep this blog succinct, we’ll focus on the top four.

You can use technographic data to:

• Score and prioritize accounts;
• Refine the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP);
• Segment accounts with precision for sales and marketing outreach; and
• Deliver tightly personalized marketing messages.

1. Technographic data to score and prioritize accounts

One of the most important uses for technographic data is in scoring and prioritizing accounts to go after. For example, if your solution works particularly well with a specific technology, like marketing automation systems (MAS), then assign a score range to it, which can be from 0 to 100. Companies that use a MAS for which you have an optimized integration can get a score of 100. As the MAS diminishes in value, the score decreases. Accounts without a MAS would get a 0 for that score.

Find the account’s “fit” score

You can do this exercise for every technology that matters to your business, assigning data point scores to each of your accounts. The final tech score can be added to other scores, including the firmographic and demographic scores. The aggregate of all three scores can be the account’s total “fit” score. Once you have the fit score for each account, you can rank them according to their propensity to become a customer.

Let your AI do the work

Additionally, technographic data can be used in your artificial intelligence algorithm to identify your best customers. For example, the Demandbase One predictive analytics and Pipeline Predict scores look at opportunities from the last six months as well as data around firmographics, technographics, marketing automation activities, intent activity, and website activity to help predict the likelihood of an account turning into an opportunity. Sales can then focus on accounts with a high Pipeline Predict score to reach out to and close.

Simply put, including technographic data into how you score and prioritize your accounts gives you another data point to bolster your scoring model.

2. Technographic data to refine the Ideal Customer Profile

Another practical application for technographic data is in refining the ideal customer profile (ICP). Once you identify the technographic characteristics of past qualified accounts and your best customers, you can incorporate that technographic profile in your ICP.

When refining the ICP, consider the account’s information technology spend and their technology purchase behavior. By gleaning this intelligence, you’re able to focus on accounts with higher revenue potential.

Similar to how we use technographics in the Demandbase One Pipeline Predict score, we also use technographic information to create a Qualification Score for an account. The qualification score reveals how well an account fits the ideal customer profile. By using technographic data in this model, we are basically saying that past qualified accounts had a similar technographic profile, so the likelihood of this account fitting your ICP and ever becoming a customer is higher.

3. Technographic data to segment accounts for Sales and Marketing outreach

Once you’ve prioritized the account list and refined the ICP, what you are left with is your target account list (TAL). Segmenting the TAL for Sales and Marketing outreach is the next logical step. Account segmentation can be done in a number of ways, as we cover in our eBook The Market Segmentation Playbook. However, for SaaS companies, using technographic data for segmentation is a sure-fire way to reach accounts that are most interested in the technology you have to offer.

Segmentation done right is a time-consuming process. But it can be easily done in the Demandbase One ABM Platform. First, the technographic data is added to target account data. Then, you can segment the data, like filtering an account table for specific technologies or creating an account list using a combination of specific technologies and other activities, like website visits or Sales touches. The Sales team can create a specific territory plan around target accounts with a specific technology to hone in on the specific accounts that matter to them.

4. Technographic data to deliver tightly personalized advertising and marketing messages

Finally, once you’ve segmented your target list of accounts, you can craft your advertising and marketing campaigns and messaging around the information you know about them.

For example, you could have a whole campaign around how your product works well with a specific technology and reach out to customers showing that technology in their tech stack. To create such a campaign, Marketing can create a list of accounts using Marketo as their marketing automation platform, as an example, and tailor the campaign message around the benefits of using Demandbase One with Marketo, for a complete ABM end to end solution.

You can also create a very targeted advertising campaign using an account list that includes a particular technology. This ensures you’re directing your advertising dollars towards the most important accounts that you care about.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, technographic data presents lots of possibilities for prioritizing and segmenting accounts! As a core part of the ABM Platform within Demandbase One, it’s yet another way that Demandbase One helps you focus on the accounts that matter most.