What are technographics?
Technographics are data about the technology a company uses: its website platform, CRM, analytics, payment provider, cloud host and other software. Sales teams use them to find companies running a competitor, a complementary tool or an outdated system, and to tailor the pitch to the stack.
How detection works
Most technographic data is inferred from public traces:
- Website code. A Shopify store loads Shopify scripts. A site using a particular chat widget, analytics tool or tag manager leaves its fingerprint in the page source.
- DNS records. MX records show the email provider, and TXT records used for SPF, DKIM and DMARC often list the services allowed to send mail for the domain, such as a marketing platform or help desk.
- Job listings. "Experience with HubSpot and Zapier required" is a strong clue about the stack.
- Reviews. Someone who reviewed a product on a software review site almost certainly used it.
A worked targeting example
Say you build a migration service for online shops moving off an older e-commerce platform. Technographic targeting would look like this:
- Find stores whose site code shows the old platform.
- Narrow to stores in your countries with a product catalogue large enough to make migration painful (estimated from sitemap size).
- Add timing: stores hiring an e-commerce manager, or whose owners posted about checkout problems.
- Contact the owner or e-commerce lead with a message about the specific pain of that platform.
Steps 1 and 2 are technographics and firmographics. Step 3 is what makes the list worth contacting this month.
How to judge technographic data
Spot-check before you buy. Take 20 companies from a supplier's list, open their websites, and check the claimed tool in the page source or DNS. If more than a few are wrong or out of date, expect the same across the list. For internal tools, ask how the supplier knows: "inferred" and "observed" are very different.
Common mistakes
- Treating detection as usage. A leftover script is not a paying customer.
- Assuming the stack equals the buyer. Knowing a company uses a rival tells you nothing about who owns the decision. You still need the person.
- Pitching the data. "I noticed you use X" is a weak opener on its own. Say what problem that usually causes and ask whether they have it.
Related terms
Technographics sit alongside firmographics as fit data in lead scoring, and are a common input to account-based marketing lists.
Where Sluice stands
Sluice does not offer a technographic filter. The closest thing it does is competitor reviewers: paste a G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, App Store or Google Play review page and each reviewer becomes a lead, with their stars beside their words. That gives you named people who use a rival and have said what they think of it. See Sluice vs Apollo for how that compares with a database approach.
Questions people ask
- How is technographic data collected?
- Mostly by scanning public websites for scripts, tags and DNS records that reveal tools, plus job listings that mention software and, for some vendors, survey or partner data. Tools used only internally are much harder to detect.
- How accurate is technographic data?
- Good for anything visible on a website, such as the e-commerce platform or analytics. Weak for internal tools like accounting or HR software, which leave no public trace. A script can also linger after a company stops paying for the tool.
- What is technographic targeting used for?
- Competitive displacement (companies using a rival), integrations (companies using a tool you plug into), and timing (companies on an old platform likely to migrate).
Try it on your own market
Sluice quotes the worst-case price before anything runs and charges only for lookups that found something, so finding out costs close to nothing.
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