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Beyond Technographics: Why You Need Technology Intelligence

Beyond Technographics: Why You Need Technology Intelligence

HG’s data-driven insights enable sellers to grow and accelerate revenues by targeting and intelligently engaging accounts with the highest propensity to buy. Our “Technology Intelligence” represents a quantum leap beyond technographic data.

Technology companies face continuous pressure to maintain aggressive revenue growth in an increasingly competitive global landscape. To hit their aggressive growth targets, companies need more than “just” the best product, distribution, service, and people. They also need Technology Intelligence  –  the best and most actionable data available today. When you know your market, you can grow your market, finding the opportunities that competitors miss.

Today, technographic data is a well-known term in the analytics field. In fact, HG Insights first coined the term back in 2010. We pioneered the use of technographic data to improve business decision-making. Why? Because we saw so many technology companies under immense pressure to maintain growth. While many companies rely solely on conventional firmographic data about industry, revenue counts, and employee size to build a Go-To-Market strategy, this Go-To-Market approach is no longer sufficient to sustain growth. Nor is it sufficient to rely upon technographic data, which fails to provide a larger, more dynamic context for account engagement. 

Now, the same company that coined the term ‘technographic data’ has once again revolutionized the industry with Technology Intelligence. 

Technology Intelligence: A GPS to Find More Opportunities

Companies selling technology gain greater competitive advantage by leveraging detailed, accurate, up-to-date, and dynamic intelligence on the global technology landscape. It’s also by leveraging that intelligence in multidimensional, customizable ways enabled by the most relevant, deeply-granular data. Technology Intelligence is a GPS for expanding revenue opportunities and growth, a navigation system that goes far beyond “just” technographic data to provide actionable insights for finding and engaging target accounts/companies.

Technology Intelligence enables sellers to:

  1. Make better and more timely decisions
  2. Take relevant, personalization engagement actions fueled by high-quality intelligence

Put simply, Technology Intelligence from HG Insights perfects your Go-To-Market and turbocharges your revenue engine.

It’s important to understand the differentiation between Technology Intelligence and technographics

What is Technology Intelligence, Exactly?

Technology Intelligence builds substantially on the limitations of technographic data by delivering a comprehensive view of the entire technology ecosystem at both the market- and account-level, so you can target and engage accounts with precision. Technology Intelligence combines the following data 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 – see more below) 

Having all this rich, granular data under the umbrella of Technology Intelligence from HG Insights enables you to 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. 

Technology Intelligence: Multiple Dimensions of Data Driving Multiple Use Cases

“HG Insights and our Technology Intelligence show you multiple dimensions of technographic data, including what products an account has installed, how many locations they have it, the date it was first detected, the date that it was last verified, contract data/subscription renewal timelines, and much more,” says Ari Echt, Director of Enablement and Account Insights at HG.

Let’s explore just a single dimension of technographic data — location data — and its potential use for sales. In HG, 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 can be quite useful. “If you’re a sales rep for a marketing automation provider and you want to figure out where to call within a large enterprise, HG enables you to see exactly where within an account there’s more opportunity, 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,” explains Echt. That level of data granularity matters for knowing who to engage, when to engage, and how to engage them.

Technology Intelligence: Spend Data is Key

Another important component of Technology Intelligence is spend data. Technology Intelligence from HG Insights provides granular spend data around what an account spends on technology across the organization, on specified categories of technology, and on individual applications.

With HG, technology sellers can see that a specified account is spending $440 million across all technologies, and that they spend $6 million on a marketing automation platform. How might that granularity help? It helps sales teams qualify, target, and prioritize the accounts with the highest propensity to purchase. If you sell very expensive marketing automation software, for example, it might help to see a list of companies that are using Marketo (a competitive offering) and also spending a minimum of a million dollars within the marketing automation technology category. 

HG Technology Intelligence enables you to build account lists in a multidimensional and customizable way around account spend and other relevant technographic data.

Spend data can also help you understand your share of wallet within an existing customer account. Let’s say you sell an expensive enterprise solution and you’re getting paid $200,000 annually from an account. You might think, “Great, we own that account.” But what happens when you learn the account is actually spending $10 million total in that category, so you ‘own’ just 2% of their total category spend? 

You’d probably change your tune, moving from complacency (with your 2% “ownership” of wallet share) to working much harder to capture the account’s remaining 98% of wallet share. Technology Intelligence from HG can help you identify opportunities for expansion that can completely change how you view your penetration and revenue expansion opportunities.

Contextual Intent 

HG not only offers you intent data but provides a meaningful context for understanding what “intent signals” might mean. HG’s Contextual Intent data takes the specific intent signal (i.e., an account is searching on topic X) and layers it on top of the existing understanding we have of an account’s infrastructure. “For example, HG will tell you if a signal represents a displacement opportunity – meaning the account/company has a competitor’s product already installed, but is now researching other products within the same category,” says Echt. If an account’s renewal date is looming and they’ve been searching for information about alternate providers, that sounds like a good time to engage them around your offering.

Or maybe an intent signal represents a ‘white space” opportunity where the account has no existing vendor in a category, but is searching for one. “HG’s Contextual Intent data gives sales teams that larger picture, which helps inform when and how they engage with an account,” says Echt. “You can also, of course, layer this contextual intent data into your account scoring” to make your scoring more accurate, dynamic, and actionable. 

Technology Intelligence and Account Scoring

Tech Intelligence enables you to score on multiple dimensions of technographic data in a highly granular way. With HG you can see product penetration, how many products the account uses in a specified technology category, how long each product has been installed, its contractual relationships/renewal timelines with vendors, various dimensions of account spend (as detailed above), and much more. 

That’s deep and highly actionable Technology Intelligence that fuels smarter account engagement. You can slice and dice however you want.

“HG’s breadth and granularity of Technology Intelligence provides a deep understanding of accounts, which can directly inform account scoring and account prioritization,” says Echt. Your scoring with HG will be fine-tuned and highly dynamic, especially with our contextual intent and spend data.

Want to know more about Technology Intelligence and how it can be leveraged to “know your market to grow your market”? Reach out to HG Insights for the fuel to turbo-charge your revenue engine.

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