Technographics As The Game Changer In The SaaS World

Take a moment and think about the game plan for your outbound sales activities. Clearly you do not rely just on inbound marketing, but rather combine it with outbound activities. Technographics are information from websites of predominantly saas companies such as CRM, languages, page speed, latest traffic updates.

Technographics in the saas market

At Sales.Rocks we use technographics and hyper-personalization with dynamic content that result in increasing the click through rate by more than 180%. Moreover, we combine technographics and ICP to allow identification of pain points for more granular targeting.

Read further to discover how we do it.

How to use technographics for profiling

The first step to finding your target audience is finding your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) which is usually defined by geography, a job title or a specific industry.

• Geography: Where is your customer located (Continent, Country, Postcode, Radius)
• Industry: Which industry is your ICP in (NACE, keywords etc.)
• Size of the business: Measured in employees or revenue
• Job Title: A specific job title that you are after

Next, we do a research via LinkedIn or some B2B databases to find companies or contacts that match the selected patterns.

With these patterns in mind, we can now use your SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) to start searching in order to convert them to active users. However, in many cases, this data is not detailed enough and we use other factors that would improve our incidence rate of a valuable target lead.

In SaaS, technographics refers to the profiling of specific accounts based on the technology stack. Similar to demographics and psychographics, technographic classifications is a criteria built upon the technology they use.

Example 1: Fine-tuning

You are a Digital Marketing Company with the focus on WordPress websites. You are targeting small businesses between 10 and 50 employees, located in a 50 km radius of where your business is located (in case of onsite meetings), located in the B2B space and ideally a person in the marketing communication sector.

However, what are the chances that people have an actual pain that you as an agency can tackle?

Pain points as in: an insecure website, low ranking website, low conversion, outdated website.

Using technographics we can now look for companies with:

• Slow page speed
• Tracking Plugin like Google Analytics installed
• Low Domain Authority
• Outdated PHP version
• Outdated CMS

Slow Page speed means that no optimization has been performed yet, which provides a digital marketing company room for improvement, and a potential business opportunity. 

A tracking plugin like Google Analytics is installed meaning that the owner has some interest in tracking the activity, but has not realized it. Low domain authority also provides opportunity for link building for the digital marketing company. Using Sales.Rocks, all these technology options can be defined.

The next step involves selecting the geography (e.g. in the Area of North Holland or 50km radius around Amsterdam), the size of the company (e.g. 10-50 employees), specific industries (B2B Services), and a direct contact person (Owner, Director, Marketing or Communication person).

Example 2: Lead Segmentation

You are a Web SaaS technology company that offers heatmap tracking software.

Your ICP profile looks like this:

• Countrywide coverage (eg. Netherlands)
• All companies between 10 and 50 employees
• Sales / Customer Success Manager / Product Manager
• All commercial business (no non-profit or educational)

Using technographics we can now add companies that have a website as criteria and additionally segment companies into these owning a heat map tracking module vs. no tracking module.

With this setup our client was able to create two kinds of campaigns:

1. Companies not using a heatmap tracking software
2. Companies already using a heatmap software

For companies already using a heatmap software, the client was able to provide a targeted “our product vs. yours” benchmark email which targeted precisely all advantages of their solution. For this, the client was able to really target specific tracking solutions together with all the drawbacks of each solution (integration limits, pricing etc.)

Instead of manually checking for usage of technology, the technographics search criteria does the work for you. Score!

How does Sales.Rocks uses technographics?

How we at Sales.Rocks skyrocketed email click-through rate by 180%

The business proposition of Sales.Rocks is providing marketing & sales insights and contact data for B2B data. Most of the data gets loaded into a CRM or Marketing Automation systems.

Our main focus groups are either B2B companies in the Netherlands that use a CRM or Marketing Automation systems.

In our selection we can do the following steps:

1. Target Region South and North Holland
2. Target Contact Marketing / Sales people or Leadership team
3. Users of Marketing Automation or CRM platforms 
4. 20-50 employees
5. In the B2B space
6. Spend 250 Euro or more on tech

Technographics helps us find companies in our target region – South and North Holland

As a SaaS company, using technographics helps us find companies that are in the correct ICP, but also use CRM that we provide integrations for Hubspot and Zoho CRM.

This way of targeting yielded a 180% higher click-through rate. We also used some additional technographics and dynamic targeting info within our email to increase engagement. More on that in the next blog.

We are curious to learn whether you have other suggestions for usage of technographics email marketing and sales.