3 Data-Based Ways to Improve ABM Now

3 Data-Based Ways
to Improve ABM Now
New data sources are fundamentally changing
your ABM potential
A TechTarget and HG Data Guide
®

23 Data-Based Ways to Improve ABM Now
Contents
3 Introduction
4 Chapters
4 Developing a Killer Target
Account Profile
14 Micromessaging Improvements
You Can Implement Now
9 Better Propensity Modeling
for Agile Teams
20 Conclusion
22 About HG Data
22 About TechTarget

Introduction
Without the right data, ABM can’t
deliver better ROI. Relying on your
customer data alone to simply target
lookalike accounts won’t deliver the
breakthroughs you require. Growth
beyond the level of your historical
demand generation success
fundamentally depends on access
to new types of insight.
This e-book from TechTarget and HG
Data will help you understand new
sources of data and how to apply
them to drive greater value from your
ABM programs.
In it, you’ll get practical tools, advice
and plenty of examples on using
technographics and purchase intent
together to:
• Develop target account profiles
that are more actionable and more
productive
• Build propensity models that
maximize your share of the accounts
and prospects that are ready to buy
now
• Create micromessaging that
improves conversion at every touch
point, for both marketing and sales.
Keep reading to get the
information you need to
accelerate the success
of your ABM programs.

Developing a Killer Target
Account Profile

According to the most recent State of Pipeline Marketing report, more than 60 percent
of B2B marketers are doing “some form of account-based marketing.” And last year’s
SiriusDecisions State of Account-Based Marketing Study found that marketers using
ABM reported 19 percent greater revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability. From
our own work with clients on ABM, it’s very clear that success (and failure) with ABM
begins right at the very beginning—by starting from a well-conceived and enabled Target
Account Profile, also referred to as Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If you don’t choose the
right accounts to go after, it will be very hard to achieve the kind of ROI you need to sustain
internal support for your ABM program.
If you plan to invest more Sales and Marketing effort in a particular set of accounts, you’d
be wise to make sure you really understand your targets and then build your tactics based
on this understanding. You might be surprised at how many companies kick off their ABM
effort with insufficient attention paid to this simple logic. Launch your ABM program from a
position of strength by doing the best possible job of selecting the right prospects that you
possibly can.
Start by working closely with Sales, then expand
There are a number of different factors that go into building Ideal Target Profile(s) within
your Total Addressable Market (TAM). When determining which accounts to go after with
ABM, you’ll of course want to work with your Sales colleagues directly. However, if you’re
relying only on your sales reps to identify high-value accounts, you’re probably missing a
great deal of opportunity as many ideal customers may not even be in your sales funnel yet.
You’ll also want to leverage all of your company’s current customer data on what has been
To build an ABM
program that
supports growth
in accounts
where you have
very little history,
it is essential to
turn to reputable
sources of
proprietary
3rd-party
information.

successful historically. But while historical success can yield a lot
of useful information about the companies where you have already
done well, there’s a limit to how much it can tell you about where
new opportunity actually lies. If you’re looking to grow outside of
existing top accounts, you’re likely to need additional information in
order to capture more of your Total Addressable Market.
To build an ABM program that supports growth in accounts
where you have very little history, it is essential to turn to reputable
sources of proprietary 3rd-party information. SiriusDecisions
recently-released “Demand Unit Waterfall” makes this concept
abundantly clear by pointing out two critical ideas. First is the
importance of a well-defined market—they call this “Target
Demand.” If you pick targets for ABM that are not a good match
for your company’s strengths, no amount of ABM effort is likely
to achieve what you seek. Second is the power of actual buyer’s
journey activity for focusing your ABM energy—they call it taking
advantage of “Active Demand.” The fact is, that if you can’t tell
which accounts within your ABM list deserve more attention right
now, you’ll end up spending too much effort on many that won’t
respond at all, and too little on the few who really should.
Strengthen your data foundation: 3rd Party
Demographics and Firmographics
To use ABM as a growth engine, the minimum 3rd party data you’ll
want is demographic and firmographic. Demographic data tells you
about the people you seek inside the accounts you’ll decide to go
after. It can include information such as a contact name, work title,
work history, social connections and more. Firmographic data tells
you about the companies as a whole, including information on
company size, employee count, revenue, market vertical, location,
and more.
In the old days, this is where you might have stopped. But in today’s
super competitive environment, to really make progress fast, you’re
going to want to do better.
New data sources that will change the way
you approach ABM
To deliver the kind of performance that ABM leaders achieve, you
should seek out two of the newer forms of insight that can make all
the difference. Good technographics, data on what technologies
are already installed within a particular prospect account, can
make or break whether you can accurately target opportunities
inside prospect companies at all.

Purchase intent information, insight gained from relevant content consumption patterns, can
then highlight which of your appropriate targets is actually engaged in a buyer’s journey in
your solution area at this very moment. Bringing these two information types into your ABM
program early sets you up to quickly attain the kinds of ROI necessary to sustain and evolve
your program over time.
More about 3rd Party Technographics
By definition, technographics provide information on existing technology installed within
a prospect company. Depending on the source, it may include related insights such as when
a particular technology might have been purchased, how long it’s been in use, or where
exactly it is being used within the firm, be it enterprise-wide, as a centralized service, in one
department or by many different departments or divisions. Of course, the more user groups
you can identify, the more use cases there are in action, the more potential “demand units”
(as SiriusDecisions calls them) there could be for you.
More on 3rd Party Intent Data
Intent data is behavioral information about prospects that indicates an impending purchase.
It is present in both internal systems—websites, marketing automation systems, CRM—
and in external interaction channels. While there are different sources for this type of
information, the best is collected from interactions with content that is closely related to
your particular solution and that has been designed to uncover stages in the buyer’s journey.

By combining new forms of data in support of ABM, marketers are now better able to
understand solution fit and readiness to buy. Because this information brings a whole new
level of clarity about who to target right now (target account profile), more and more clients
are using it at the outset of their ABM journey to more quickly realize the kind of ROI they
require. These new types of 3rd party data enable marketers to become far more focused
on the right accounts to go after. Greater knowledge reduces targeting waste and enables
much better messaging specificity to drive a new level of collaboration between Marketing
and Sales. They can now both focus on the accounts that matter and learn faster how to
partner successfully on executing the right plays, be it a Marketing action, a Sales action or
a combination of both.
In the next chapter, we’ll look more closely at Sales and Marketing partnership. Specifically,
we’ll show how Marketing can use technographics and purchase intent in combination to
develop a propensity-to-buy model that will be directly applicable—and directly valuable—to
your Inside and Field Sales efforts.
By combining
new forms
of data in
support of ABM,
marketers are
now better able
to understand
solution fit and
readiness to buy.

Better Propensity Modeling
for Agile Teams

In the first chapter, we talked about the importance of
technographics enriched with intent data for enhancing targeting
effectiveness. While Ideal Target Account Profile or Ideal Customer
Profile (ICP) identification is usually Step 1 in building out an
account-based marketing program, it quickly raises the question
of which ICP’s among your Total Addressable Market (TAM) truly
have a propensity to buy. That’s why, for most ABM programs, the
obvious next planning step is to dive deeper into propensity.
Defining Propensity to Buy
In propensity-to-buy analysis, you look deeper, beyond simply
which companies might be a good fit for your offering some
time, to examine key indicators of a higher likelihood to seriously
consider a purchase in the near future. It’s a much narrower focus.
And when you add in quality behavioral data to your mix of inputs,
you can narrow your focus further to those companies who are
already actively researching a purchase. This work can be a critical
step for you to take on your path to higher performance, because
it allows you to concentrate on a much smaller group of prospects
than you get if you stop at ICP and TAM. For Marketing, this
smaller group means you can create more targeted messaging.
For Sales, it means much less time wasted prospecting where no
real demand exists.
Using Technographics to Uncover Propensity
Technographics illuminate the facts around a company’s specific
hardware and software installations being used to run their
particular business. Within HG Data’s advanced tech install
information, curated from more than 2 billion unstructured
documents, your marketing and sales teams can glean critical
insight about how receptive a particular account or set of accounts
might be to considering a new solution. HG Data can help you
determine if your prospects are ready to upgrade, renew, or
purchase a new technology solution. You can exploit:
• Add-on opportunity: What technologies (hardware or
software) the account has installed
• Replacement opportunity: Whether they are using
competitive or complementary technologies
• Upgrade opportunity: When they adopted specific
technology products
• Timing: The company’s historical technology adoption rate
(example, are they fast or slow adopters of new technology)
• Specific pain points: Legacy products installed with known
short-comings

Using Real Purchase Intent Insight to Target Active Buyers
Building on the technographic knowledge HG Data provides, TechTarget adds in the
behavioral insight necessary for you to know who’s in an active buyer’s journey right now.
This is real purchase intent insight, not information scraped from the open web.
To capture real purchase intent, TechTarget maintains a network of 140+ websites
focused exclusively on enterprise technology content that they create. More than 18 million
enterprise technology buyers subscribe to this content, interacting with it more than a
million times each business day as they research their purchases. TechTarget monitors
these behaviors, analyzes them, and makes them available via their Priority Engine purchase
intent insight portal: Priority Engine™
provides direct access to extraordinarily rich behavioral
information about active buyers in your market. These insights are critical
in helping to answer questions such as:
• Which accounts are most active?
• Which specific members of the buying team—with names and contact details—are
performing research?
• What topics are they most engaged with?
• What relevant editorial or vendor-sourced content have they viewed?
• What competitive vendors are they considering?
• What is the recency, the velocity and how widespread is their activity?
Knowing the answers to these questions before you act puts you in much better position
to optimize all your outbound—and even your inbound—Marketing and Sales activities.
Combining
knowledge
of installed
technology with
rich behavioral
insight into
buyer’s journeys
in action gives you
the quality signal
necessary to more
effectively guide
your actions.

Coupling Technographics with Intent
Combining knowledge of installed technology including timing
(technographics) with rich behavioral insight about buyer’s
journeys in action gives you the high fidelity signal necessary
to truly guide your actions more effectively. Technographics
show who is likely to consider a solution; purchase intent tells
you who among them is actively investigating a purchase.
Example: Propensity to Buy in Action
As you will see below, using two different 3rd party data sources
as essential sources for creating a simple yet powerful propensity
to buy model enables your team to focus on the prospects likely to
convert right now:
• Situation: a maker of BI solutions for financial applications
offers a reporting module that integrates seamlessly with two
market-leading ERP systems. The software automates several
key process elements, plus it offers much more intuitive data
visualizations. The company needs to accelerate sales cycles
so they want to do a better job of identifying prospects that are
more likely to purchase a solution soon.
• Technographics: Through its own research, the company
knows that organizations larger than 150 employees who have
been using any of the two market leading ERP systems for
more than 3 years are ready to move. They are highly likely
to have users who would welcome their new functionality the
saves time and increases visual impact. Using technographics,
instead of targeting all companies 150+ with ERP, they identify
all the companies matching their specific precursor system
criteria.
• Purchase Intent: Working from this refined segment, they add
in a 3rd party behavioral feed and look for the active accounts
among the total segment. Reputable 3rd party data should
include exactly who’s active, what they are consuming both in
terms of objective buyer-focused editorial and vendor provided
material and how to reach them.

Propensity to Buy Model
Technographic
Criteria
Intent
Criteria
150 Employees Yes
ERP Package One or Two Yes
Installation Date 3+ Years
Viewing BI-related content Yes
Engaged with you and/or
competitor content
Yes
Prospects research 4
# of Total Views 12
Viewed late stage content Yes
When last viewed 1 week ago
They now have everything they need to do a highly targeted
nurturing effort direct to the critical members of prospect buying
teams. At the same time, they can alert their BDRs, and even
F9ield Sales by territory to the topics that really matter to the
target audience. In this way, they will save their teams hours of time
and effort, they’ll deliver better conversion rates across the funnel,
and they’ll be on their way to breakthrough ROI.
In our final chapter, we’ll be taking a look at using these data
sources for two specific use cases: competitive takeaway
campaigns and complementary add-ons. We provide very specific
guidance on how to construct hyper-specific micromessaging
to make the most of every touchpoint.

Micromessaging
Improvements You Can
Implement Now

As we’ve discussed in this e-book so far, if you can get better information about a potential
customer, that puts you in a better position to really target your marketing efforts more
effectively. We’ve explored leveraging both technographics and purchase intent to zero
in on those accounts and prospects who structurally and behaviorally demonstrate a
propensity to buy. In this final chapter, we’re adding the final touch that can make or
break campaign success. We call it “micromessaging” because it uses insight to make
general campaign messaging much more relevant to specific recipients. Once you’ve
established better targeting, it’s the combination of relevance and timing, leveraging both
technographics and intent, that leads to breakthrough conversion.
Weaknesses in Classic Approaches to Targeting
and Messaging
Classic B2B targeting methods have relied too much on size and seniority. We assume
that if a company is huge it must have a need. It’s logical. We assume that the CXO will ‘get’
our value proposition—makes sense, we think, because those people are really smart and
our value prop seems super compelling to us. In the end, it’s the very obviousness of this
kind of thinking that is it’s downfall. Not only is everyone else targeting the same people,
but they’re also raising up their message to a CXO level of abstraction to make it very clear.
They’re talking “value delivery,” “TCO”, “next generation” and all those generalities that make
everyone sound like everyone else. This can’t possibly work. And it doesn’t. We all know that.
To be effective, you’ve got to think long and hard about who you’re talking to and what
you do that can make a substantive difference to them in their business lives. It starts with
targeting the right people. Then it’s all about speaking to them at a level that will resonate.
Once you’ve
established better
targeting, it’s
the combination
of relevance
and timing,
leveraging both
technographics
and intent,
that leads to
breakthrough
conversion.

Operationalizing Micromessaging
Obviously, micromessaging begins with microtargeting. While you are usually going
to have to engage senior leaders at some point in the process, to gain an initial foothold
in an organization you’ve got to seek out and connect to the people who are experiencing
the issues your solution addresses. By talking to prospects and studying past deals, you
can create a clear picture of the roles/titles that were critical to initial phases of past
success. While final purchase decisions commonly appear to be made top-down, the reality
is that the discovery process commonly occurs deeper in the hierarchy. Your past-win
analysis will tell you the personas you have to talk to.
With target personas established, the next step is to use technographics to further
segment your target set into distinct groups based on the particulars of their current
installation and how your solution fits with it. What you are doing here is formulating
hypotheses about differences in key purchases drivers and feature/functionality needs.
Since you’ve developed your solution to address these, you know what they are; the
difference here is in how you believe these will be prioritized by a prospect based on their
own situation. To make the best start possible, you’ll want to do two things:
• First, test your hypotheses with some customers. You can accomplish this by developing
messaging in partnership with your Sales team and working with them to present it to
customers who you trust to be honest with you.
• Second, you’ll want to compare your hypotheses to what purchase intent data is
showing you about active prospects in your market. Real purchase intent insight is
built from the consumption behaviors of IT buyers doing pre-purchase research in your
solution category. By studying the topics and actual content resonating with your target
audience right now, you can see how to adjust messaging to take best advantage.

Micromessaging for Specific Campaign Types
Renewal/Upgrade Campaigns
Whether you’re an earlier stage company or relatively mature,
Renewal and Upgrade campaigns are critical to ongoing business
health. While they may not be as sexy as white space and
aggressive competitive actions, you cannot ignore them because
they can provide the financial fuel necessary for everything else.
Furthermore, no matter how sticky you believe your solution to be
customers have never had more to choose from and it’s constantly
getting easier to switch. Therefore, your company’s very livelihood
could depend on your ability to deliver full clarity around why it is
better for the customer to stay with you than to begin considering
doing anything else.
To make sure you maximize the likelihood of early renewals and
rapid upgrades, you need to stay on top of a lot. You need to
understand changes in the competitive environment, changes in
customers’ installs, and changes in their mindsets. As you develop
your micromessaging skills, you’ll want to solve for each of these.
The fact is that renewal (and upgrades as a subset) “campaigning”
actually begins at or before installation. As soon as you can, you’ll
want to implement retention streams that stimulate usage of and
appreciation for your solution.
To maximize preparedness, with your solution roadmap in hand,
you start by compiling a series of “what if” scenarios based on
what you learn from customers and see developing in the market.
Since few teams can manage for all possibilities, you’ll want to
make some pragmatic decisions about the most likely and perhaps
the most dangerous situations to prepare for.
As the final piece in the puzzle, you’ll want to identify “leading
indicators” that you can use as advanced warning of trends
developing that you’ve prepared to actively defend against.
Specific Add-on/Complementary Solution
Campaigns
Beyond simply targeting accounts that can use your solution
based on their existing installs, for certain solution-types there
are trigger events that suddenly create an opening for you. Similar
to what we saw with the Renewal approach, success with the
Add-on campaign case begins with thinking through some likely
triggered add-on opportunity scenarios. It’s important to note that
unlike the macro triggers that are high on everyone’s radar (things
like Sarbanes Oxley of a decade ago and the upcoming GDPR
from the EU), microevents create opportunities that Marketing
might typically not have the agility to take advantage of.

Technographics give you the potential to pre-plan for these and therefore be ready and able
to act when the data tells you you should. Using technographics and purchase intent gives
you the opportunity to become as proactive and agile as the very best performing solution
providers have learned to be.
Competitive Conquesting
Competitive conquesting is both particularly exciting and uniquely challenging. Joining with
Sales, you’re setting out to do hand-to-hand combat in the real world. To succeed in this
arena, you’ll try to out-innovate your competition from strategy through execution, across
the board. It’s difficult, and it can be both frustrating and wasteful. To maximize effectiveness
with competitive conquesting, you’ll want to employ elements from each of the campaign
types we’ve been talking about up to now. Where possible, your campaign will take as
much as it can from what you’ve learned from your Renewals and Add-on approaches, then
enhance them further to explain exactly why a switch-out for prospects like these makes
particular sense at this time.
You will want to begin your campaign effort well in advance by initiating a micromessaging
stream to the relevant contacts deep within your target companies. You’ll want to create
early engagement with them by sharing the things you’re learning from your own customers
that could stimulate thinking about their own situation. In addition, you will want to prepare a
ramp up against scenarios they’ll encounter as they near a possible decision event.
While engaging
early is important
to have those
contacts when you
need them, a true
micromessaging
approach means
you don’t come on
strong until the
relevant time.

In the past, you might have tried to simply pound away at them with
thought leadership. With new data sources, you are in a position
to synchronize delivery of relevant messages to when they will
actually start to pay attention to them. While engaging early is
important to have those contacts when you need them, a true
micromessaging approach means you don’t come on strong until
the relevant time.
When used in combination, these new data sources, combined
with well-crafted micromessaging, can create an approach to
competitive conquesting that makes far more sense. No Sales
team wants to spend a lot of time trying to talk to customers about
a change when they’re a long way from even considering it.
Likewise, Marketing should do everything it can to deliver
only those messages that are relevant to a customer based on
an understanding of their situation. Make sure your 3rd party
technographic and purchase intent data are dynamic and updated
on a regular basis so that you can be effective and efficient.
For many of our clients, it’s simply the availability of these new
data sources that starts to change everything for them. They now
begin with a much better picture of what is actually happening
within their target audience so all their campaign activities become
more focused in nature. And as they become more adept at using
the material, we see them start to refine their approaches to a
very granular level. When they start adjusting their messages to
address install changes within an account and the concerns of
real people within these targets, they achieve another level of
performance yet again.

Summing It Up
Whether you need a strong start or to improve your ABM
implementation, it is clear that solid 3rd party data is essential.
Technographics is key to help strategically determine your total
addressable market as well as your ideal customer/target profile(s).
Once you have agreement between sales and marketing on the
target profiles and accounts, 3rd party intent can help you zero in
on the target people within these accounts.
Many companies will use titles as a guide to find the “right” people
but this approach will only go so far. Understanding and identifying
who actively researching, consuming content, looking at your
competitors, etc. can help you concentrate on those contacts are
mostly likely to engage with you in a buy cycle.
We put micromessaging based on technographic and purchase
intent insight last in this e-book because it’s an advanced step
for many marketers. Combining your 3rd party data allows you to
create micromessages that differentiate you with reference to what
is present at the prospect and how they are currently thinking.
Not only do you have insight into their operation, you have insight
into their minds. If you start with the end in mind and don’t bite off
too much too early, we’re confident that it’s within reach for most
organizations.
Conclusion

The Power of Partnership – How TechTarget
and HG Data Work Together
By using advanced data science to curate its library of more than
2 billion unstructured documents, HG Data can identify all the
companies in the market place using products that compete with
or complement your own offerings. From there you can easily
make a reasonable calculation of total market potential. HG Data
provides the tools that allow you to quickly identify prospect
accounts or enrich your understanding of potential or ability to
segment existing accounts within your CRM. And since HG Data
technographics are continuously updated, you can use them to
find net new accounts that match your target account profile.
To capture real purchase intent, TechTarget maintains a network
of 140+ websites focused exclusively on enterprise technology
content that they create. More than 18 million enterprise
technology buyers subscribe to this content and interact with it
more than a million times each business day as they research
their purchases. TechTarget monitors these behaviors, analyzes,
and makes them available via their Priority Engine purchase
intent insight portal. Priority Engine provides direct access to
extraordinarily rich buyer purchase information in your target
technology market segment. You can see exactly who is active at
the account and individual level, what content they’re consuming,
the scale and intensity of their interest, the competitors they are
looking at, and more.
Through the partnership, when you subscribe to Priority Engine
you can also see what technology your prospects are using within
the interface. So in one place, you can combine what you need
to know about a prospect’s installed technology with behavioral
signals that help you not only target to determine what approach
to use at any given time. HG Data updates their data source on a
monthly basis and TechTarget adds a weekly append of accounts
and the individuals within them, ranked in terms of their purchase
intent activity.
Here’s how it works in practice:
• HG Data technographics tells you what is installed allowing you
to identify opportunities for renewals and upgrades.
• TechTarget purchase intent shows you when a target company
is starting to do research around this particular solution area
• Now is the time to ramp. For Marketing, this is certainly the
place to launch a new nurture stream designed to stimulate a
change in solution providers. You may wish to involve Inside
Sales or similar resources to execute what SiriusDecisions
calls “small net fishing” campaigns where you deploy
micromessaging via the phone.

About HG Data
HG Data uses advanced data science to provide B2B companies
a better way to analyze markets and target prospects to achieve
remarkable results in their marketing and sales programs. We offer
the most comprehensive technographics in the industry, indexing
billions of unstructured documents each day to produce a detailed
census of the technologies companies use to run their business.
This is powerful information you can put to use immediately to out-
market, out-sell and outgrow your competition.
To learn more about Technographics from HG Data, visit
www.HGdata.com/Technographics
About TechTarget
TechTarget (Nasdaq: TTGT) is the global leader in purchase intent-
driven marketing and sales services that deliver business impact
for enterprise technology companies. By creating abundant,
high-quality editorial content across more than 140 highly targeted
technology-specific websites, TechTarget attracts and nurtures
communities of technology buyers researching their companies’
information technology needs. By understanding these buyers’
content consumption behaviors, TechTarget creates the purchase
intent insights that fuel efficient and effective marketing and sales
activities for clients around the world.
TechTarget has offices in Boston, London, Munich, Paris, San
Francisco, Singapore and Sydney. For more information, visit
techtarget.com and follow us on Twitter @TechTarget.
To learn more about Intent data and TechTarget’s Priority Engine,
visit TechTarget.com/Priority-Engine.
©2017-2018 TechTarget. All rights reserved. The TechTarget logo is a registered trademark of
TechTarget. All other logos are trademarks of their respective owners. TechTarget reserves
the right to make changes in specifications and other information contained in this document
without prior notice. The reader should in all cases consult TechTarget to determine whether
any such changes have been made. Revised 1/18.

3 Data-Based Ways to Improve ABM Now

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3 Data-Based Ways to Improve ABM Now