10 Reasons Why Every B2B Marketer Should Use Technographics for Account Segmentation

To most-effectively go after your target accounts, you have to define just how valuable their business is to you, and that means admitting that some of your accounts are more valuable than others. Some accounts have a higher propensity to purchase, others a profile strikingly similar to your most-valuable clients, and it’s our job as marketers to reach out to each with personalized messaging that conveys just how valuable they are to us. To do this, we have to get  account segmentation right. And, if you are a B2B company that provides IT solutions — or any other type of company, for that matter — technographic data can help us do just that. 

By the end of this blog, you will have a better understanding of what technographics are and how a solution like Demandbase Data can help you segment your target accounts, regardless of the industry you are in.

They aren’t just another company

As smart B2B marketers, we don’t base our efforts on shallow, one-size fits-all strategies because we know that one-size-fits-all doesn’t win accounts and it certainly doesn’t retain them. There are an insurmountable number of competitors and tech options out there, and if you don’t woo your target accounts, odds are they’ll go with a solution that does. 

Accounts demand hyper-personalized and contextual marketing efforts that let them know you don’t see them as “just another company.” Otherwise, they’ll lose interest, which is not only a bummer, but also a lot of wasted time, effort, and budget.

First thing’s first, though: You have to define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and outline your total addressable market (TAM). Once you do that, you can segment and prioritize your list of target accounts. Let’s dive in. 

What is account segmentation?

When you segment your accounts, you divide them into smaller groups based on an in-depth understanding of each account’s unique characteristics. These can be things like the account’s potential to convert, purchase power, revenue potential, a combination of those, or any one of dozens of critical metrics.

What is technographic data?

Technographic data provides us with intelligence that helps us identify the target accounts most-likely to make purchases at the end of our acquisition campaigns based on insights gathered from each target account’s tech stack, tech usage trends, and interest in purchasing new technology.

Including technographic data insights into market segmentation strategy is for every business that sells technology solutions. You can extract massive benefits from segmenting based wholly or in part on technographic data to answer important questions, like:

• What hardware and software, applications, and tools does the target account use?
• Which applications and tools does the account use and with what frequency? 
• How does the account implement and utilize the various systems and platforms?

If you’d like to learn more about technographics and how to leverage data to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, check out our infographic on technographics.

10 reasons why technographics help reveal your best accounts 

Most businesses that offer IT products or services already use technographics to some degree, but any company can gain value from incorporating it into their campaign and strategy building efforts.

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can use technographic data to segment and prioritize your best accounts:

1. Identify your best-fit accounts

Knowing which accounts in your campaigns are most-likely to convert can keep you a step ahead of the competition. Technographic data can help you identify which accounts are more likely to buy what you’re selling, and knowing that makes it twice as easy to figure out which of your handful of campaigns you need to pour more attention into.

If you approach important accounts with the right messaging, you can make them more willing to engage with you and consider your solution to their partner stack.

2. Time your outreach

Every B2B marketer wishes they had a crystal ball to tell them when their customers are on the hunt for a product just like theirs — I’ve tried rose quartz, amethyst, and citrine, but nothing has worked…yet. (I’ll keep you posted.) — But imagine how wonderful it would be to know the moment your competitor’s contract with their best customer expired or when one of your accounts looked at a competitor’s solution: You’d know exactly when to swoop in and turn that opportunity around for massive gains!

Technographics give you the insights you need to make timely outbound sales touches, while also revealing the usage trends of your competitors’ products. This way, when usage on a competitor’s solution dips, you know that accounts using that product could be open to considering other services and you can hit them with more personalized marketing efforts.

3. Understand your competition

Understanding the competition is half the battle (possibly the toughest half of the battle). But how are you supposed to know what they’re cooking over there and who has already bought into their solutions?

With technographic data, you don’t have to wonder because you’ll have the inside scoop on your target accounts’ entire tech stacks. When you know exactly what you’re up against, you can formulate a strategy that positions your solutions to blow the competition out of the water and majorly increase your win-rate.

4. Understand which partners’ products are installed

On the flip-side of understanding the competition’s status with your target accounts: your partners. Without knowing how many, or which of your partners’ products have been installed within each target account, you miss out on a huge opportunity to get the ball rolling with a warm introduction from a vendor the account already trusts.

When you profile an account with technographics, you see exactly which of your partners already has an in with each of your target accounts and use their help to increase sales velocity.

5. Enhance sales productivity

According to TOPO’s Sales Development Leadership Report, 2020, “Sales Reps and SDRs spend so much time on non-sales activities that it is a leading factor of them not meeting their quotas.” 

CSO Insights found that only one-third of a seller’s time is spent on selling, and almost 20 percent is spent on call planning.

That’s crazy! Salespeople should spend their time selling, not digging for prospects. Clearly, this is a massive waste of time and resources, but there is good news: Technographics can get rid of this issue. Having a deeper understanding of your clients’ and prospects’ tech compatibility, purchase power, and usage , means your Sales and Marketing teams have the knowledge they need to prioritize accounts and eliminate opportunities — so they can get back to selling.

6. Calculate an account’s revenue potential

Since the purchasing power of accounts is highly variable, segmentation and prioritization of target accounts based on their purchasing capabilities is a need-to-have. The accounts that use expensive tech or all-in-one solutions are the most-likely to invest in new solutions.

With technographics, you’ll know which accounts use established tech solutions, multiple free solutions, or lost-cost solutions, so you can score them on a scale of 0 to 100, 100 being the most likely and 0 being the least likely to purchase your solution. This way, you can effectively prioritize accounts in your target account list (TAL).

7. Refine your ICP

Your ICP is a categorical picture of the type of account most-likely to invest in or buy what you’re selling. So, the more accurate your ICP, the higher your account conversion rate.

Leveraging technographic data, you can identify which technographic characteristics of your most qualified accounts as well as your best past customers and incorporate those specific qualities into your ICP. 

Technographics gives you access to metrics like an account’s IT spend and their tech purchase behavior, data points that you should consider when refining your ICP to the point where you can accurately focus your efforts on your TAL’s most profitable accounts.

8. Reveal new opportunities

Suppose you restricted your focus to a handful of industries, but later learned that an industry you’d previously ignored leverages a similar tech stack. Those uncharted markets could hold a ton of opportunities for you.

Companies that take full advantage of technographic data often find that their TAM is larger — even many times larger — than they thought.

9. Better understand accounts

With technographics, you can uncover a host of invaluable insights about accounts you might have otherwise ignored, such as their level of compatibility with specific tech, budget, needs, and so much more.

Based on an account’s tech landscape and how they navigate it, you can determine whether your offering fits into their existing stack, then segment and prioritize them accordingly. So that you don’t spend months trying to fit a square peg into a triangular hole.

When you know an account’s tech requirements, your marketing becomes more targeted and your sales reps can have more educated and meaningful conversations from the first meeting.

10. Don’t just take my word for it.

Thankfully, you don’t have to. The stats speak for themselves.  A report published by CSO Insights notes that:

• Forecasting made it to the “Top 12” list World-Class sales practice for 2019. 
• Having a clear strategy for leveraging data as an asset for sales is part of a World-Class Sales System.
• Organizations that leverage a formal and structured forecasting review process increased their win rates of forecasted deals by 25% compared to organizations that used random or subjective approaches. 
• Subjective and historical data are the most commonly used data types within forecasting. 

Changing the way you prepare to go-to-market

From helping you build precise customer segmentation tailored to the buyer’s journey to retention campaigns, technographics offer a vast range of benefits for you and your team. 

Technographic segmentation helps you find target accounts that align closely with your ICP and are, therefore, more worth your time. In combination with firmographics and intent data, you can prioritize and target these high-value accounts to get better conversion rates and close more deals.

You don’t have to go at it alone.

We can help you explore the unending cosmos of your best accounts, identify technological consumption both in front of and behind firewalls, competitive installs, tech spend, and a range of other factors unique to your business and your target audience. In addition to technographic data, the Demandbase Data offers you a unique feature called Account Revenue Potential, which helps you identify which of your target accounts would provide the highest contribution to your company’s sales.

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