As 2023 wraps, technology companies are under immense pressure to maintain aggressive revenue growth in an increasingly competitive global landscape.
With 2024 planning underway, something is becoming clear to sales leaders — when you know your market, you can grow your market, finding the opportunities that competitors miss. However, insights that were once enough to guide your go-to-market strategy are no longer sufficient. Technographic data, for example, no longer provides the larger, more dynamic context needed for effective account engagement.
But sales leaders in 2024 need more.
For this week’s Insider Interview, we’re joined by Archie Moore, HG Insights’ Senior Manager, EMEA & Lead, Tech Consulting, who shares why Technology Intelligence is the missing piece of the puzzle of sales success.
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Archie, first, give us the definition of Technology Intelligence and how you see it.
Well, Technology Intelligence is a combination of data points that builds substantially on the limitations of technographic data by delivering a comprehensive view of the entire technology ecosystem at both the market and account levels.
This varied data helps you make better decisions about which markets and accounts to prioritize, which products to consider developing, where to allocate your limited resources, who to partner with, how to plan your sales territories, all the way down to what messages to send to whom and when. You can use Technology Intelligence to target and engage accounts with precision because it combines multiple data types to uncover accounts with the highest propensity to buy:
- IT install data (when a tool was installed, deployment locations, and for how long)
- Contract insights (who are an account’s providers, for how long, what are the account’s renewal timelines, and more)
- Intent signals and Contextual Intent Data (more below)
- Spend analysis (how much an account spends broken down by technology category and providers)
Having all this granular data, under the umbrella of Technology Intelligence, enables you to make better decisions. It’s crucial for leaders for its ability to mitigate against changes in the market due to:
- Increased competition
- The diminishing costs of switching between data providers
- The increasing costs of customer acquisition
So where is Technology Intelligence in the market today?
It was before my time, but HG Insights actually invented that term 13 years ago.
Technographics became a kind of standard term in the B2B SaaS industry, but it still has a bit of a narrow definition — essentially it’s whatever technology is being used at a point in time by any company in the world.
But we’ve progressed over the last 13 years since HG coined that word, and we’ve developed an expanded and more nuanced view of our markets. Technographics just don’t really cut it anymore. In today’s world, there is much more data available at our fingertips — and sales leaders need to know how to use it.
We’ve got install data, contract, spend data, intent data, and getting that all together is what gives you that really rich picture. So, combining all this data — historical, real-time, and everything in between — we get Technology Intelligence. And it comes from broadening the quantity of data sources to solve those bigger problems.
Technographics = Narrow
Technology Intelligence = Broad
So this whole ecosystem around Technology Intelligence, insights beyond just technographics, has allowed our customers to solve bigger and bigger problems.
As a sales leader, how do you use Technology Intelligence?
Technology Intelligence can be used by every team, from the C-suite and corporate development all the way through to individual sales and marketing teams.
No matter what you’re doing, from strategic planning down to campaign execution — Technology Intelligence helps. It makes your sellers make better and more timely decisions and take relevant, personalization engagement actions fueled by high-quality intelligence, then your sales motions have a far greater chance of success.
So we use Technology Intelligence in a few ways. First, we use it in our own sales processes—to qualify, target, and prioritize the accounts with the highest propensity to buy. Planning and optimizing.
Let’s look at just one source of Technology Intelligence— location data — and how you could use it in sales motions. In the HG Platform, you can see that a specific account is using a particular application or tool in multiple locations. When it comes to selling to large enterprises with locations around the globe, that location data is invaluable. Say you’re a sales rep for a marketing automation tool and you want to figure out where to call within a large enterprise. With HG you can see exactly whether there are displacement opportunities, depending on the type of marketing automation product, the specific locations it’s being used in, how long it’s been used, and the renewal timeline. That level of data granularity is crucial because with it you know who to engage, when to engage, and how to engage them.
How else do sales leaders use Technology Intelligence?
So because we’ve got the broader budget information as well as installs, as well as contracts and historical information, we can get really accurate with market sizes and shapes and then break that down into what are the regions and in that region, who are the companies that are growing or not growing using or not using a certain technology? Then we can get all the way down to the people within the companies that are actually responsible for that.
We can detect the footprint of departments and roles within a specific company (such as data science, data engineering, and data analysts) and chart how they change over time—on the individual, department, and organization levels. We can then determine which data science-related technologies are in use, where, and on what infrastructure.
So you can look at the market segments and where you’re growing, where you’re not, where other segments are growing, and then use that report to make strategic decisions for your company. And for sales leaders, that’s as good as gold.
We’ve seen Technology Intelligence help the percentage of sales reps that met or exceeded quota in the prior year (this can be further divided by account size, product, geography, etc.), average ramp time for AEs and SDRs, expansion rates in existing accounts, number of touches to book a meeting, number of touchpoints before an account is put into the pipeline, sales rep attrition rate and more!
Thank you, Archie!
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HG Insights: The Authority in Technology Intelligence
As pioneers of Technology Intelligence, HG Insights provides intelligence on 120 million installed technologies across more than 1.5 million global organizations and 32,000 IT software and services contracts. We have helped our customers optimize their business practices by improving the:
- Percentage of sales reps that met or exceeded quota in the prior year
- This can be further divided by account size, product, geography, etc.
- Average ramp time for AEs/SDRs
- Average deal size
- Expansion rates in existing accounts, which can be measured in different ways, such as geographic or product expansion
- Number of touches to book a meeting
- Number of touchpoints before an account is put into the pipeline as an opportunity
- Sales rep attrition rate
- Impact of HG Insights sourced accounts
HG Insights provides business decision-makers with Technology Intelligence so they can identify and prioritize their best prospects and opportunities. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help support you and your organization.
