The rising interest in understanding not only the challenges customers face but the technology they’re using in-house has led Forrester to partner with HG Insights to provide continuously updated technographic data to its research services.
Based in Santa Barbara, Calif., HG Insights announced the partnership on Tuesday, whereby its data on technology adoption trends across 45 global markets will become part of Forrester’s Business Technographics Service. The two firms said the partnership will help B2B firms in the tech space better understand their addressable market, as well as what kind of resources they need to allocate towards demand generation and sales enablement.
HG Insights says it has ingested more than three billion documents like press releases, job postings, government filings and blog posts that make mention of the technology tools a particular company is using. This could include everything from IT infrastructure and software-as-as-service (SaaS) applications to security tools. That unstructured text gets curated and time stamped with when it was discovered, so that customers can have a better sense of who is using what. The company tracks more than 5,000 vendors and more than 10,000 unique hardware and software offerings.
According to HG Insights vice-president of partnerships Don Wynns, Forrester first approached the firm around the middle of last year.
“They had the epiphany that, as sophisticated and granular as their survey data is around technographic adoption, it’s survey data,” Wynns told B2B News Network. “It takes a long time to do, it’s expensive and its shelf life is finite.”
Forrester’s partnership with HG Insights is coming not long after it bolstered its ability to help B2B marketing and sales teams with the acquisition of SiriusDecisions. Technographics, meanwhile, has already driven M&As elsewhere, such as the ZoomInfo purchase of Datanyze not long before the former was bought by DiscoverOrg.
Wynns noted that HG Insights does not offer a traditional analyst or advisory service, which means there’s no danger of any competition between the two firms.
“The Forrester use case is very strategic in nature,” he said. “We look at much more tactical questions: what’s your ideal customer profile, how do you prioritize for outbound vs. inbound, how can you take share from competitors?”
While Forrester might have done a survey on the adoption of private cloud tools in the advanced manufacturing space, for instance, HG Insights data can help validate that research even if the survey was fielded a year ago, Wynns said.
Beyond the Forrester partnership, Wynns said the company is also seeing increased demand based on the increased complexity of the martech “stack” within many organizations, as well as the interest in researching a specific set of target customers through account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.
“We have benefitted greatly from a move away from a spray and pray approach to ABM,” he said. “The more sophisticated the buyer, the better off we are.”
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