In this post, Intricately CTO and Co-Founder Fima Leshinsky shares his insights into why applications are a fundamentally crucial lens into a company's digital DNA, and how Intricately helps cloud sales and marketing teams accelerate revenue generation by getting actionable insights on the cloud footprints of more than 7 million cloud buyers.
If you were asked to describe the identity of your business, what would your approach be? Would you focus on the people you hire and the teams they form? Would it be about the products you develop, or the software you employ? Perhaps a mix of all of the aforementioned?
In the same way that the people in your business represent your company's DNA, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the software and applications your business operates represents your "digital DNA". This digital DNA is an incredibly rich source of insight into where a business is focused and, when viewed at a macro scale, where markets are moving at large.
Let’s explore what a company’s digital DNA can teach us about a company’s identity – and how we can use applications and application infrastructure to better understand businesses and the cloud market as a whole.
What applications reveal about a business's digital footprint
Whether a company is building its own applications or taking software off the shelf and running it, this investment creates a digital property that becomes core to the business itself.
As an example, let’s consider a company who launches a website (an application) where Shopify is used to take payments. Taking this into consideration, we can say with confidence that this is an e-commerce business selling some type of product.
In other words, you can understand a lot about a business just from one of their applications.
If we extrapolate this example to a large enterprise, with hundreds – and sometimes thousands – of applications, the level of insight one can generate from analyzing their applications becomes quite compelling. Consider a company with tens of thousands of employees distributed all over the world: there is a substantial variety of applications enabling their day-to-day operations and powering the services they offer.
At Intricately, the insights we can collect from these applications are highly valuable, whether they are:
When we begin to track the changes a company’s applications undergo over time (such as the adoption of new products and technologies or the scaling of infrastructure and traffic), we start to see a business growing, hiring, and expanding into new markets.
While a business may have many differing priorities and initiatives, the software applications that a business decides to build is the truest reflection of its aspirations. And because it takes so much effort to build these applications, it’s also indicative of the areas of investment where a business has the highest level of conviction.
In the not-so-distant future, every business will have applications running in the cloud, whether it's a website, full-fledged dynamic application, or some other type of software-based service.
The question is, how do we, as marketers, use the insights available on a company’s digital DNA to create real value for our own companies – and our customers?
Why is application infrastructure such a compelling insight?
Companies have historically used firmographic data to drive their sales and marketing operations. The need has always existed for teams to be able to score leads and understand account potential.
But with only firmographic insights available, how were teams building prospect lists? Understanding their market size? Qualifying leads?
As a sales team, having more information about your prospects empowers you to be more targeted and effective with your communication. Digital insights (rather than physical) enable teams to do just that, at scale.
Insights one can gather from a company's digital DNA can oftentimes be more valuable to a sales and marketing team in building an ideal customer profile, calculating TAM, understanding market focus, and deciding where to invest.
No more being “in the dark” about your prospects. Our detailed cloud product adoption and spend intelligence helps cloud revenue teams focus their go-to-market strategies on sales prospects with the highest customer potential.
How Google Cloud increased their lead-flow by 50%
We’ve had the pleasure of working with teams at Google Cloud since the early days of Intricately. Prior to partnering with us, they were discarding over 50% of leads coming into their Google cloud business.
The issue was a lack of firmographic data about these leads. With only an international domain but no additional information, they had no way of telling how many employees were at the company. When this was the case, the lead was discarded.
Using digital signals, Intricately built a model to estimate the number of employees at a company. This was our first stab at using our own platform to model something outside of spend – and it was incredibly accurate.
Out of the tens of thousands of leads Google Cloud had discarded, there had been approximately 10% that were valid prospects that Google Cloud should have been engaging with all along. Without Intricately, they had no way of knowing that.
The insights we provided allowed Google Cloud to score all those discarded leads, increasing their top-of-funnel lead-flow by 50%.
Mapping digital DNA through applications
As time goes on, the pace at which new applications are built is accelerating. This is driven by innovations across the cloud and no-code or low-code tools which allow anyone (not just engineers) to build and deploy applications.
The more applications companies deploy, the more insights become available for cloud teams to understand their prospects and customers.
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If your team is ready to take advantage of the growing amount of data available on your prospects, we’d be happy to show you around Intricately.
Schedule a demo with us to align your sales and marketing team with the right target accounts for your next go-to-market launch.
