Globally, the cloud computing market size was valued at $266 billion in 2019 and is forecasted to expand by nearly 15% every single year between 2020 and 2027.
For cloud sellers, understanding your prospects’ comprehensive digital footprint can give you a massive advantage, accelerating sales cycles and leading to more wins, faster. Data around total cloud spend, usage, and adoption is what we call a prospect’s ‘cloud wallet’.
Many marketing and sales teams don’t even realize that this data is available. They instead continue to rely on firmographic data to drive their marketing and sales activities, leaving opportunities on the table and creating friction in their sales cycles.
Revenue band and employee count don’t mean much when you’re selling a digital product. Cloud behavior can reveal a company’s total cloud spend (their cloud wallet), as well as shifts in digital services spending. This allows sales and marketing teams to efficiently target and prioritize the most appropriate prospects with the right messaging at the right time.
Acting on firmographic data alone means flying blind; cloud spend data acts as your radar.
Leveraging the comprehensive picture of cloud usage, spend, and adoption data in your go-to-market programs makes for more effective prospecting and better messaging. Here’s why (and how).
There is no shortage of data to help marketing and sales teams identify their total addressable market (TAM) and leads within their ideal customer profile (ICP).
But marketing and sales teams spend time sifting through information to hopefully find the best prospects and attack those first.
Many companies still rely on firmographic data to complete these exercises: number of employees, the magnitude of their sales organization, and HQ locations. The problem is today’s digital footprints are complicated. Nike, for example, has more than 100 domains. You can see where Nike’s HQ is, but you’d have no idea how much Nike spends on CDN around the world.
In short, firmographic data is not effective in generating accurate or comprehensive ICPs or TAMs. Translating it into sales opportunities time consuming at best and imprecise at worst.
Firmographic data also has the more insidious effect of laying the groundwork for poor understanding of target accounts as the sales cycle progresses. Once marketing departments have this data, they use it as the foundation for automated campaigns, retargeting efforts, and lead scoring. If that groundwork is inaccurate or misses the point entirely, sales ends up with fewer quality leads.
Creating campaigns based on this incomplete data results in the following:
These outcomes are an all-too-familiar reality for sales reps. Companies that rely on firmographic data don’t arm their sales teams to accurately gauge buyer propensity or to reach out to prospects at the appropriate time.
Many companies measure sales metrics by the amount of meetings booked (“X number of calls = Y number of qualified opportunities resulting in a close rate of Z”).
But the traditional discovery phase of the sales cycle is actually the least efficient stage. Discovery calls are a manual way of gathering information. They’re time-consuming for both the prospect and the salesperson. An hour-long conversation could end in discovering that the prospect is not a fit for the product, resulting in wasted time and opportunity cost.
Reps usually struggle to land these meetings to begin with and when they do, prospects are also often reluctant to share key pieces of information with salespeople they don’t personally know. The result is further inefficiency, greater uncertainty and lower performance.
To reduce frustration and increase opportunities, reps must be armed with more granular insights, actionable intelligence, and complete data sets that help them more efficiently and confidently navigate the complex B2B sales process.
This is doubly true as the buying process becomes more complicated. What was once a one-person decision made by a senior-level executive now involves as many as seven different stakeholders and can take up to seven months to close.
Reps need a strong, clear understanding of the relationship between applications, the companies that deploy them, and the products that power them so that they can use this data to sell more efficiently into accounts. They need insight into a target account’s cloud footprint.
Customers use Intricately to size markets and territories, assess/score buyer propensity and attain a comprehensive understanding of growth and activity across the digital ecosystem.
A “cloud footprint” is the digital map of a company’s critical operations and buying signals for cloud software. The intel to form this map is usually collected from their IP addresses, DNS records, message headers, and API call content.
Intricately provides these insights to give sales and marketing teams more detailed and relevant information about potential target companies. The intel helps them prioritize the most lucrative and likely to close accounts based on the services they’re using, their cloud configurations and whether their spend is trending up or down.
The Intricately Global Sensor Network constantly maps and monitors Internet based digital activities, actions, contributions and communications. With thousands of physical deployments spread across 6 continents and 150 countries, Intricately can deliver answers to the most challenging questions about a company’s cloud spend propensity and potential.
Identifying the cloud footprint of target organizations validates whether prospects are worth the time and energy to pursue. To make sales and marketing decisions that result in ROI, companies need to discover the following information:
Cloud footprint data also helps address a specific question for sales and marketing teams: how do I translate spending patterns and trends into use cases for teams selling cloud products?
The benefits of cloud wallet and usage data go beyond identifying prospecting opportunities. Granular insight on prospects means you can queue and sequence messaging that matches an account’s particular challenges and plans for growth. Here are a handful of potential plays to run using the information described above.
Most businesses have multiple providers of critical cloud services to ensure continuity and as a protection against lock-in. A marketing team selling CDN services can search for prospects that meet total or estimated CDN spend who are only leveraging two CDN providers. This is a great opportunity to position your product as complementary to other CDNs or to provide product feature superiority.
What about a company that is leveraging three separate CDN services? Most commonly, an organization will be extremely reluctant to rip and replace the tools they leverage the most. They are, however, much more likely to consider replacing the CDN service they leverage the least, given that it’s probably in place as a backup.
Most digital SaaS products run in multiples of 12-month periods. Volume of traffic is a telltale sign of expansion of an existing service or if a new service is being deployed. Knowing when a service first came online allows for opportunities focused on giving a better value or solution than the incumbent competitor.
Prospects seeking to deploy new types of services will often signal expansion through the deployment of small footprint testbeds. Typically, a company will set up an internal service offering to test the product before making a purchase. By observing these footprint testbeds and gathering supplemental information (such as SME job listings) gives sales and marketing teams the opportunity to make the first move and lead with a strong presence.
Account based marketing (ABM) has been shown to be far more efficient than legacy approaches. But the main issue for most teams is quality prospect prioritization. It is paramount that ABM touches are directed at the correct personas. Otherwise, a campaign can be highly ineffective and a waste of marketing team resources — especially since ABM campaigns are expensive and time-consuming already. By leveraging a company’s cloud wallet, marketers empower themselves to conduct tightly targeted campaigns matched with accurate messaging.
Using cloud footprints can help sales and marketing teams with their biggest bottlenecks: lead prioritization and the ability to match prospects to the ICP.
Here are some ways this approach can benefit your sales and marketing initiatives:
With the right data, your sales teams can prioritize target accounts and shorten the B2B sales cycle.
Those selling into the cloud market must realize that firmographic data is not an adequate foundation for marketing campaigns and sales efforts today. With cloud wallet data for your ideal customers, you’ll be able to target and prioritize cloud computing accounts and close more deals.
Companies like Cloudflare, AWS, Verizon Media and Fastly are already integrating cloud wallet data to power their marketing and sales teams. Schedule a demo to see how Intricately can provide your sales and marketing teams with the detailed infrastructure insights they need to sell more, faster.
