TechTarget added a set of Confirmed Projects to their Priority Engine service. Projects include company information, project location, project contact name, purchase criteria, and purchase details. Purchase criteria include top purchase drivers, product feature criteria, and vendors under consideration.
Purchase details include capabilities being considered, key factors in choice of vendor(s), deployment method, departments where the purchase will be used, and anticipated benefits.
“The integration of Confirmed Project intelligence within the platform provides an expanded view of the Total Buying Team as well as new deal insights and angles – all in one place – to help Sales teams win more meetings, opportunities and deals. The addition of Confirmed Project data provides a much deeper layer of intelligence on project criteria, specific vendor shortlists and key purchase drivers which enriches and expands insights available within Priority Engine to give sales teams more points of entry into live deals.”
TechTarget Press Release
Confirmed Projects are displayed alongside TechTarget intelligence including Owler company overviews, TechTarget buying teams, DiscoverOrg contacts, and HG Data installed technologies.
Confirmed Projects are collected by TechTarget’s “team of skilled in-house research assistants who are responsible for calling active prospects from high-ranking Priority Engine accounts.” Prospects exchange project intelligence in exchange for TechTarget research.
TechTarget intelligence is accessible from “any browser and imported directly into Salesforce.”
“We saw rapid growth in the use of Priority Engine to fuel inside sales efforts in 2018 as more and more of our customers’ sales teams are using the insights we provide into prospect interests, research focus, vendor considerations, and tech installs. Using this data, leading sales teams have seen up to a 4x increase in opportunity conversion. The addition of Confirmed Projects within Priority Engine will fuel this growth even more.”
TechTarget SVP of Products Andrew Briney
Priority Engine raised revenues 29% in Q4 year-over-year and “bookings remain strong.” The firm signed an additional 32 customers in Q4 and the firm raised Priority Engine prices by 10% in January 2019 after raising them 20% in January 2018. The price increase was across all Priority Engine solutions. As price increases are recognized over the life of contracts and renewals are overweighted to Q4, much of the 2018 price increase will show up in 2019 revenues.
“People that signed up prior to the beginning of the year were protected in their previous year’s pricing, but then we added other add-on bundles and solutions, because…we are integrating a lot of our branding lead generation offers into Priority Engine,” said CEO Mike Cotoia. “So there is an up-sell capability and opportunity for our customers to…create a greater share of voice percentage within the markets they care about.”
“Our customers continue to increase their commitment to becoming data-driven sales and marketing organizations. This is creating opportunities to strengthen our partnerships with our customers by further embedding our purchase intent data into their systems to make their sales and marketing efforts more intelligent, competitive and efficient.”
TechTarget Shareholders Letter, February 6, 2019
TechTarget admitted that the data subscription business differs significantly from their traditional quarterly marketing campaigns. Over the past two years, they have learned that service requirements vary greatly by size. Larger firms “who have sophisticated systems and ample resources” can immediately leverage intent data for awareness campaigns and fueling sales outreach. Enterprise accounts have revenue renewal rates “well over 100%.” However, smaller firms require more handholding and renew at less than 100% of revenue. To assist SMBs, TechTarget has assembled a unified customer success team to offer post-sales service and support. “We believe over time that this will increase our revenue renewal rates with this customer segment. “
TechTarget described a strong IT spending environment with multiple catalysts for growth: AI, security, data analytics, and cloud migrations. In the US, accelerated depreciation of capital expenses through 2022 gives “companies a short window to invest in technology with favorable tax treatment.”