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Companies must have a strategic plan to grow and expand, especially in challenging times like the current pandemic, where market dynamics have shifted and priorities have shifted. Most B2B companies use traditional market reports to guide their strategic decisions, but they are not enough.

However, with the right market intelligence, B2B organizations can prioritize their accounts, reevaluate territories and rethink their ideal customer profile to actually thrive.

In this episode of the Modern Marketing Engine, my guest, Elizabeth Cholawsky, PhD, describes how technology intelligence helps companies plan with confidence and make better decisions. She is a seasoned executive leader in the technology industry with a strong focus on growing successful SaaS-based businesses. Elizabeth has led and worked with companies to build market-leading offerings, using in-house talent as well as through partnerships and acquisitions.

Elizabeth is the CEO at HG Insights. The company has built the world’s largest and most accurate database of B2B technology customer intelligence, tracking more than a million businesses and the specific technology stack products they are using. Elizabeth won Comparably’s 2019 Best CEO for Women Award.

This post summarizes our conversation. I invite you listen to the entire episode (33 minute interview) to learn more about market intelligence and how it can help your marketing or sales team succeed.

Success Begins with Strategic Planning Whether your company is trying to determine which territories to expand to, how to align sales and marketing with the right accounts, staff your business appropriately and invest in effective tools for growth or persuade investors to fund you, or pivot due to COVID-19 you need strategic planning.

But where do you start? You must start with data.

Unfortunately, traditional market reports are not enough to make informed decisions. Most are based on customer surveys interpreted by analysts and provide only high-level numbers on potential size and growth of a market. These reports are too generic and not very actionable.

This is where technology intelligence comes in.

Technology Intelligence Elizabeth says that her clients are usually looking for much deeper insights than what’s provided on an analyst report, which is generally an estimate of the total available market (TAM) or serviceable available market (SAM). What they need is to understand their serviceable obtainable market (SOM), which represents the segment of the market they think they can realistically capture with their product or service. And to obtain the SOM, they need detailed tech intelligence on what technology products their accounts or prospective buyers have installed.

Tech intelligence allows the entire organization to make better decisions. For instance:

Sales leaders use granular tech intelligence to map out and divide their sales territories into regions that contain accounts that match their ideal customer profile (ICP). Sales and marketing teams use tech intelligence to develop and deliver highly relevant campaigns with messaging customized to a prospect’s strategic initiatives, existing solutions and pain points. Product teams use tech trending information to make decisions on which products they need to enhance or end, and what new solutions they need to develop to better compete in the future. Elizabeth says that the data HG Insights provides is so detailed that their clients can understand what technology products are installed at each account and what the budgets are for those products. That way they can make fair comparisons between markets. In our interview, Elizabeth shared an example contrasting tech intelligence between Germany and France, providing data to support the decision to invest in one country over the other.

In Challenging Times You Must be Able to Change Your Plan Quickly When a crisis such as COVID-19 hits, organizations must re-think everything: from reevaluating territories to reevaluating their ICP. In the current environment, account prioritization becomes critical.

How can the right market intelligence help marketing and sales teams to focus their efforts? Elizabeth says that tech intelligence can help sales by identifying accounts with the highest propensity to buy, with insights about a company’s tech stack and what their budgets are. And it can help marketing in developing messaging to address pain points for better engagement rates.

One success story Elizabeth shared is Citrix, which used tech intelligence to build an $80M pipeline, reduce sales cycles by 30% and quadruple the rate at which they turned leads into opportunities.

Listen to the entire episode as Elizabeth shares more details about how the right market intelligence can enable B2B companies to identify the best opportunities, even in the midst of the COVID...