It’s long been Enlyft's mission to be a leader in technographic intelligence. We're excited to announce that we've taken technographics to a new level. We’ve developed and validated two technographic attributes (comprised of thousands of different technographic factors) that our customers can leverage to gain a deep understanding of their buyers. The inclusion of these attributes has significantly increased the quality of our predictive models. We’ve seen up to a 2% improvement in performance as a result of the addition of each of new technographic attribute.
The first attribute is an organization’s IT footprint To gauge this attribute, Enlyft assigns weights to a wide array of metrics, including server usage and IT staffing volume, and reliance on and adoption of various technologies. The IT footprint attribute is divided into two sub-attributes: SaaS adoption and Cloud adoption For example, our models reveal that while Samsung and Sony have similar SaaS adoption scores, they have markedly different IT footprint scores (approximately 2.3x greater in the case of Samsung). In addition, our models reveal that Costco has a 3x greater cloud adoption score as compared to Sam’s Club.
Most modern IT applications are offered as SaaS. As well, more and more organizations are transitioning to the cloud and purchasing technologies such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. Understanding an organization’s affinity for and adoption of SaaS and Could technologies is key to identifying their buying propensity for modern IT products.
The second attribute is an organization’s IT budget. We’ve seen a notable spike in the number of requests we’ve received from customers, eager to predict their potential buyers’ IT budgets. Because budgeted IT spend is typically not publicly available, we’ve leveraged machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to develop a strong proxy for this sum. We track more than 200 different categories of technologies (for example, hardware, networking equipment, and on-premise enterprise software) and have determined that certain categories are more strongly correlated with IT budget.
For example, our models reveal that Uber has a 5x greater estimated IT spend ($750M) compared to Lyft ($150M). These differences speak volumes in terms of each company’s buying propensity for different IT products. We’re continually refining the IT budget attribute and are excited to announce that we are rolling the feature out in beta this quarter.
On the surface, many buyers seem alike. Consider, for example, Costco and Sam’s Club, or Lyft and Uber, or Samsung and Sony. To B2B marketers relying solely on demographic data or rudimentary technographic data, these companies appear similar and may indeed be targeted in a similar (yet ineffective) fashion.
Sure, any of the above pairs, may both be using 1,000 technology products. One, however, may have invested primarily in high-end ERP solutions and server products, while the other may have a long history of relying on free versions of IT products and front-end solutions. At Enlyft, we uncover meaningful contrasts.
At Enlyft, our mission is to develop a deep and unparalleled understanding of the world’s organizations. In order to connect and engage with buyers in relevant ways, organizations must develop a deep understanding of their buyers. Many vendors purport expertise in technographics.
Unfortunately, the data they surface tends to be limited to a list of the different types of software and hardware products deployed by a B2B organization. This has little actionable and predictive power in terms of determining a buyer’s propensity for specific IT products. It’s difficult for the customer to make sense of the data in order to inform sales and marketing initiatives.
Our initial results are promising. In the case of Walmart, our models estimated an IT budget of $10.9B in 2017. Per an IDC report in April 2016, Walmart spent $10.5B on IT in fiscal 2015. In the case of Bank of Nova Scotia, our models estimated a $2.8B IT budget in 2017. Per a media report, the IT budget was $2.42B in fiscal 2017.
Organizations today have only experienced a snapshot of the full potential of technographics. With Enlyft’s new technographic attributes, our customers are able to gain a deep understanding of their buyers and a powerful means of competitively differentiating themselves. Understanding technographic attributes will be the key to today’s organizations thriving in the market.
With technographic attributes and current coverage of more than 4 million companies globally, we’ve taken technographics to a new level. As we add more technographic attributes, model performance improvements will only become more significant. Stay tuned for much more to come.