In the latest episode of our podcast, see how technology intelligence can provide your sales and marketing teams with a consistent framework from which to view markets, prospects, and opportunities. This helps both teams create the alignment they need for resource planning, account targeting, and campaign execution.
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Episode 3 Summary
In this episode, learn how technology intelligence:
- facilitates collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
- streamlines the process of Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
- decreased Alfresco’s cost per lead by 50% due to more accurate ideal customer profiling.
- scores and prioritizes accounts ensuring apporaptiote resource allocation.
- aligns marketing campaigns with sales initiatives.
Interview Transcript
Benjamin: Welcome to tech intelligence week on the MarTech podcast. This week we’re doing a technical deep dive into one of the most powerful and underutilized data sources for B2B marketers, technology intelligence. Each day this week we’re going to publish an episode that discusses how you can understand, identify, and reach your customers based on the software that they use to run their business.
With us today is Elizabeth Cholawsky, who is the CEO of HG Insights, which is a sponsor of the MarTech podcast and a platform that uses advanced data science methodologies to process billions of unstructured digital documents to produce the world’s best technology installation information, IT span, and contract intelligence to accelerate their sales, marketing, and strategy efforts.
Here’s the third installment of technology intelligence week where Elizabeth and I discuss using technology intelligence to support collaboration between your sales and marketing team. Elizabeth, welcome back to technology intelligence week on the MarTech podcast.
Elizabeth: Thanks a lot, Ben.
Benjamin: It’s Wednesday. We’re halfway through the week. Happy hump day and excited to talk to you more about how to use technology intelligence to help B2B brands grow.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Glad to be here.
Benjamin: So yesterday we talked a little bit about some of the ways that technology intelligence is used in the sense of identifying your total addressable market and helping do some customer segmentation. And today we’re going to talk a little bit about the overlap of sales and marketing and how technology intelligence can support that collaboration.
Benjamin: Give me the headlines of how marketing and sales in your eyes work together. Where is there overlap and where can technology intelligence help?
Elizabeth: Yeah. I don’t know about you, Ben, but in my days running marketing organizations, there was usually a riff between marketing and sales because they were operating from two different playbooks. They were both doing things that they thought were really critical for the organization and often work, but they often weren’t the same things.
So, the way that technology intelligence bridges that gap and aligns the two
organizations is that it gives the same picture to both sales and to marketing. Let me give you an example. So the sales guys, getting towards the end of the year, they’re all doing territory planning for next year, and they’re basing it maybe very astutely on, “Okay. This territory has more of a competitive footprint. This territory has more installed customer base.” And so, they’re assigning the appropriate resources and that’s a very good view.
Marketing on the other hand might have a new product to sell and they have a campaign to go out to anybody, any customer who has a technology profile that’s mature enough to get the new product. What we do, though, if they’re both using technology intelligence from us, is that they can have the same profile, the same territory. So now marketing can support the hunter territory with the appropriate messaging, and then the competitive analysis territory with perhaps a new product and another set of messaging. All of a sudden you have a synergistic alignment between marketing and sales and much more effective campaign.
Benjamin : Yesterday we talked about doing segmentation and you used the example of maybe you have two markets, France and Germany, and one is a more mature market and one is a developing market. That should impact what your marketing efforts are. And even down to individual regions within a market, understanding the profile and how much opportunity is in the maturity in terms of the technology adoption in a market is going to impact who your sales team can sell to, but also what’s your marketing messaging.
One of the things that is happening, and I see a lot of overlap in marketing and sales, is this new trend of…And maybe it’s not too new, but it’s relatively new to me, ABM. Right? And all of the lead scoring that goes into strategic accounts. Talk to me about how technology intelligence can be used to assign a value to a customer that impacts both marketing and sales.
Elizabeth: So ABM is an interesting case because the technology intelligence that we provide is heavily used in companies that really understand how important ABM scoring and account prioritization is right now. So as we’ve talked about, we can tell you what the profile is, whether it’s a laggard or a leading profile in terms of technology adoption, and that allows marketing to really target the right accounts, focus on companies where there’s a revenue opportunity via the spend, and really drive more predictable results.
I’ll give you an example of Alfresco. They use what we have for account selection scoring, and they put that there’s been a 50% decrease in cost per lead by using the technology profile information. That results in alignment with sales because they then get that target prospect and they know all about that company and they have a much more informed conversation going into the sale cycle.
Benjamin: I think this is the key to technology intelligence in my mind. Obviously, there’s a couple of different ways that this product can be used, but understanding who is likely to be your best customer and looking at the entire technology profile of your customers and understanding what some of the themes are, I think there’s a simple view of do they already have a solution for my product class installed? What’s the maturity is one thing, but then also what are some of the other products? What’s the level of sophistication and how mature is the organization?
That all goes into painting a full picture of who the right customer is. As you’re thinking about using technology intelligence to whittle down the customers that you should focused on, tell me a little bit about some of the practical applications that people are using to change their scoring methodology.
Elizabeth: Each company will use it in a little different way because they have different technologies that they’re trying to sell. But, practically, the lead scoring comes in where you might give a higher score for a company that has no product installed. That might be a big 10 on your prospecting list. Whereas if there’s a competitive product that just got installed and you know it was just in the last six months, then you’re going to reprioritize those accounts. You’re not going to waste your time. So it’s all about resource allocation and efficiency and driving quicker conversions on your target prospect list.
Benjamin: That seems like a little bit of a binary. Is this person a customer or are they not? That gives you an understanding of whether you should reach them. That’s a, “Are they a ten or are they a one?” What are some of the other maybe more incremental signals that you’re getting that help you understand whether a customer who is a possible fit for your product is a potential buyer?
Elizabeth: Let’s take the example of a global company that has maybe 20 different significant headquarters across the globe. You can watch month by month installation or trials of different products in different areas of that company. So you can, over time, watch the maturity of that organization as it grows up and, say you’re looking for Salesforce customers. Over time, you can watch the intensity of Salesforce at that company and know when it gets to a certain level that you should be really going in and talking to that global company with your product.
Benjamin: Yeah. Understanding the velocity of technology adoption, whether somebody is in the trial phase, whether they’re increasing the number of licenses or decreasing it is obviously an important signal as well. When you’re thinking about the marketing campaigns and how those marketing campaigns can set up sales, how can technology intelligence be used to help the marketing team more efficiently target to be able to support sales?
Elizabeth: Marketing campaigns get very hyper targeted with the HG Insights information. So, you can give a particular crafted message to the company based on a number of factors. There’s lots of attributes and insights that we have. We’ve been talking about the technology maturity. You can have a particular message for that. You can have a particular message for a company that you know has just de-installed products that you’re interested in, or where there’s a legacy product installed. So, these messages can be crafted into your campaigns.
And then the other thing I should mention, we have a way that you can use the HG Insight’s information in digital display advertising campaigns. So you can take your content campaigns and your nurturing of your prospects and tie that with the same kind of targeting with your digital display advertising. So, it’s all consistent and it’s all aligned. And that’s extremely important for efficiency.
Benjamin: Tired of [insert current technology solution] here? You should try X, Y, Z product.
Elizabeth: Yep, perfect. We try not to get too very granular, so we don’t want to cross that creepy barrier.
Benjamin: Always important to make sure that you’re respecting people’s privacy.
Elizabeth: Absolutely.
Benjamin: But there is a hook for people to be able to use the data in real time and integrate it into their digital advertising. So to summarize here, there’s a couple of different ways that marketing and sales teams are collaborating. There is understanding the territories and what level of
maturity and the customer profiles that are in any given territory. That allows your marketing team to understand what they should be saying to drive the right leads to sales. On the sales side, understanding the scoring, understanding the right time to reach somebody’s propensity to buy your targeted accounts, figuring out how this works into your ABM strategy. And for marketers, understanding what copy and language and how your campaign should be positioned not only for targeting, but also including some of the variables that you can show that you understand the problems that a potential target is facing? Another use of technology intelligence.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Great summary, Ben.
Benjamin: Thank you, I appreciate it and I just want you to know that I was listening to everything you said. All right. And that wraps up this episode of the MarTech podcast. Thanks to Elizabeth Cholawsky for joining us. If you’d like to hear more of Elizabeth’s insights into how to use technology intelligence, we’re going to publish an episode every day this week. So, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and check back with us tomorrow morning when we discuss how technology intelligence can be implemented and operationalized.
If you can’t wait until our next episode and you’d like to get in touch with Elizabeth, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can also find a link to HG Insights LinkedIn profile as well. You can contact her on Twitter. Her handle is ECholawsky. E-C-H-O-L-A-W-S-K-Y. Or, you can visit her company’s website, which is HGinsights.com.