Welcome to the first installment of our SalesOps Insider blog series. Our goal with this series is to provide you with quick “how-tos” on how you can leverage technographics directly within Salesforce using our HG Insights for Salesforce app. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll be showing you how to use technographics to score your leads, create campaign segments, generate reports, and develop various triggers and workflows to build more intelligent business processes. We hope you enjoy our first post on Account Scoring, which comes from our Director of Sales and Marketing Technology, Justin Kitagawa.
Alternatively, you can watch his how-to video:
Account Scoring: One of Most Popular Use Cases of Our Business Intelligence
As sales and marketing teams work to build their plans one of the most important questions is often “where do we start?” Account Scoring can be a great way to prioritize your activities and spend to get the greatest impact, but what factors should you use to build that score? Sure, you can use general firmographics, but that information is pretty common and things like a company’s annual revenue, number of employees, location, etc., are just a minimum starting point when it comes to identifying which accounts you want to pursue.
Our customers frequently cite their ability to score accounts with technographics as their most popular use case of our business intelligence. Technographic Scoring allows sales and marketing teams to identify where their solutions will have the best fit, based on the core hardware or software technologies their accounts or prospects are already using. These technologies could be competitive solutions, common integrations, or products that indicate something specific about a company, such as its willingness to use a cloud-based platform. Having this key information allows B2B marketers to target the right accounts and be more relevant when they do.
Building a Technographic Score in Salesforce
Building out the Technographic Score itself is fairly straightforward. HG Insights has partnered with Salesforce.com to build HG for Salesforce, which allows companies to enrich, append, and update their customer and prospect accounts with detailed technographics – directly in Salesforce CRM.
In the example below, we’re going to assume that we have a solution that integrates with Salesforce.com CRM very well but also works with Marketo and Hubspot. Using Technographics Scoring, we’ll create a simple process that helps prioritize accounts with these technologies.
Now to get into the details…
Steps to Create a Technographics Score
For this example, we’ll create the following custom fields:
– a Formula field on the HG Insights Technologies object
– a Roll Up Summary field on the Account object
1. First, we will create the new Formula field (returning a number) called “Technographic Score” on the HG Insights Technologies Object. The formula itself will be based on the attributes of the technology. In this example, we wanted to prioritize accounts with Salesforce installed first, Marketo second, and HubSpot third so we assigned numerical values to reflect this priority.
2. Now that we have a field on the HG Insights Technologies records that show how much scoring impact we want for each technology, we need to sum this up on the Account. Since HG for Salesforce brings in technographic insights into Salesforce as a Master-Detail related object to the Account record, we can use a Custom Roll-Up Summary field to summarize the Technographic Scores for each technology.
We can also use the Filter Criteria to only show technologies where there is a Confidence Score above 0.5 (indicating a high likelihood the technology is installed at the account).
Technographics scoring helps you prioritize your accounts with sophistication, and thanks to HG for Salesforce, it’s also easier than ever to implement into your sales and marketing organization.By setting up something similar to the above, you now have the ability to use technographic scoring to prioritize all your accounts based on the technologies they use. In this simple example, if you want to target all accounts using Salesforce (50 points) + Marketo (30 points), you could select all the accounts with a score of 80 (this value is displayed on all account records). You can also use technographic scoring as part of a generalized account score that takes into account other factors such as firmographics and behavioral data.
To learn how you can get started, visit our HG for Salesforce page today!
We hope you enjoyed the first edition of our SalesOps Insider Blog Series. Look for more posts in the upcoming weeks. And if you have topics you’d like to see covered in the future, please put them in the comments section below. Thanks!
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