Technography

A pontification on the importance of technology clusters in Account-Based Marketing

I can’t remember where I heard it the first time, but it was fascinating. As a marketer we’re usually taught to break things down to more familiar chunks like demographics, or firmographics. We think about what aspects and traits of individuals are alike, what do they all have in common? Age, gender, personal income? And as B2B Marketers, we have made up another lens of filmography, looking at characteristics of a business, things like industry, employee count, and location.

As savvy Account-Based Marketers, we now added yet another – technographics. Not a new idea. It feels like we’ve been doing it all along. But with the more and more tools flooding the marketplace, we need to better understand the common patterns of tools and solutions that make up modern businesses.

Technographic segmentation is easy when it’s a point-solution. For example, we released a new Salesforce app so it would make sense to target businesses that are using Salesforce as their CRM. Pretty obvious stuff, must be why the circus comes to town every year for Dreamforce 8v)

The point is, you built something that was made to work for a particular platform so quite obviously you are going to focus your marketing energy on building awareness from businesses that use said platform.

With so much data, and pixels, and java script floating about – much of this information is quite easy to obtain with web crawlers. Now the coverage of said web crawlers might depend on whomever deployed them, but it’s out there in the open to grab none the less. What’s not available at the front door can easily be acquired at the back via 3rd-party data providers.

But just having a match on accounts to particular technologies isn’t enough. What’s interesting is how the technologies combine together to tell a story. What does it say about businesses that uses A, B, C, D, E ,etc? What do they all have in common?

Let’s take a step back here.

Think about this the next time you are putting together a job description. You not only want to understand, experience, education, background, achievements, etc. But you also want to know if they are comfortable with, or have a mastery of the tools your business has chosen to rely on. It’s not necessarily always that the tools are bad or good, but if they can orchestrate them together in order to be successful.

So what does your “stack” say about your business? What do accounts that have common stacks mean? It could mean that certain patterns create better fits for your product than others. Some of these might seem obvious, but with the cacophonous amount of tools on the market, we’re going to need to leverage AI in order to see the important clues buried in the long-tail.

If you can become the expert, using predictive marketing to define the technographic profiles, the actions, and the next best actions according to these profiles... you’ve got an opportunity to make a tremendous impact in ABM.

What a fun time to be solving these puzzles for B2B.