Intent and technographics vendor Aberdeen announced Aberdeen Behavioral Technographics, their next-generation installed technology dataset. Aberdeen is the successor to the pioneering Ziff Davis and Harte-Hanks Access CI dataset that was developed over two decades ago.
Aberdeen notes that traditional technographics are binary, static flags at the corporate level whereas Behavioral Technographics “actively measure technology usage down to company location, number of users, and pains and priorities of the usage.”
“Technographic data has been overdue for innovation,” said Aberdeen CEO Marc Osofsky. “The reaction to our data has been amazing, companies have signed up within days of seeing the data.”
Aberdeen claims that its technographics are “up to 55% more accurate than legacy install (technographic) data” resulting in improved account prioritization, pipeline, and win-rates.
“Historical technographic data is actually still pretty new for most firms. And the way that it’s most commonly collected, at least in recent days, is focusing on job boards and individual websites to determine whether or not technology’s actually installed at a company. And they do this by…focusing on the job boards to see if a technology is present within the actual job description. There are a lot of fallbacks to this, and this new method gets around that way.”
Benjamin Cavicchi, Aberdeen Senior Data Analyst
Behavioral Technographics are based upon technology usage and topical queries, not simply installation. Data is captured from over 1,100 websites that host educational content concerning technologies. This takes them beyond traditional job board scans to include forums, tutorials, and educational sites. 365 days of behavioral data are captured which include deployed technology, pain points, and topics.
“We focus on the education of an individual about a technology because that is clear evidence that they use it,” said Aberdeen Senior Data Analyst Benjamin Cavicchi. “So what we’re looking at is a handful or a couple of thousand websites that resolve to user tutorials or user forums where people ask questions and answer them about a technology, as well as a host of other, I would say, technology-specific blogs where experts write about it.”
Cavicchi’s idea was to focus on those pages ”that answer these very specific questions that you would have in your daily work working with the technology.” This is the content that shows up when technology questions are typed into Google.
For example, if employees are researching topics about Excel, they are likely using it. “The idea is that if you aggregate all of the individuals associated with a company and you look at this historical activity on Excel, you can get a better understanding of whether or not they use it. So other users at his company may be googling other, more advanced things like how to write efficient VBA code, or creating dynamic Excel dashboards,” said Cavicchi.
And because they are looking at trends and technology questions, they can discern which companies are using precursors to more advanced solutions, usage levels, and current pain points. Behavioral Technographics are available at the location level.
“Excel is the natural antecedent to a BI solution, a more advanced one. So if you have a lot of people at a company that are writing VBA code, that are trying to create these dynamic dashboards, but they don’t have any activity on any other BI solution, it seems to me that they probably need one. We’re finding the problems of the company, and helping companies to essentially find them, too.
“Behavioral Technographics is a perfect complement to Intent Data,” said Aberdeen. “Both provide full visibility into your target market: Intent Data identifies companies in-market to buy and Behavioral Technographics provides technology in use insights to prioritize and target the remaining accounts not yet showing intent.”
Behavioral Technographics are patent-pending. Aberdeen describes its new technographics as “dynamic and quantitative.”
The next step will be behavioral profiling which is common in B2C but has yet to be extended to B2B. Behavioral Profiling will look at groups of individuals to determine buyers and influencers. For example, high levels of research around python indicate the presence of a data science team.
Aberdeen entered the intent market when it acquired The Big Willow last December.