I had a prospective client recently ask me how many Cloud Architects we had in our database — a data vendor had recently ran a query for them against the title, and were only able to find 1,800.

As of today, there are approximately 50,000 Cloud Architects in the United States alone.

But that number does not come from what it says on their business card, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a decision maker at their organization. A VP / IT Services might be a good decision maker candidate. But a decision maker of what exactly? The traditional rule of thumb for finding decision makers has always been:

Seniority + Functional Title = My Audience.

B2B data compilers have built their entire value proposition based on this equation. And while the compilers are accurate in that email addresses and direct dial phone numbers don’t bounce, they are not necessarily helping you find your ideal audience.  In fact, the above equation of Seniority + Functional Title obscures 30 – 50% of the audience you really should be talking to.

Finding Your Ideal Audience

Our definition of Account Based Marketing (ABM) is: know the account. To know a specific account means to know the exact people you want to engage with, a.k.a., the decision makers.

By building a taxonomy, not of titles, but of keywords and phrases people use to describe what they do, will bring back to you your Total Addressable Audience in each and every account. Solving the Cloud Architect conundrum was not rocket science.  We built a list of keywords and phrases that represent the heart of what Cloud Architecture includes.

Below is an example list of the types of keywords and phrases we used:

  • Cloud architecture
  • Cloud strategy
  • Cloud application infrastructure
  • Cloud security policy
  • Cloud database
  • Data loss prevention
  • CASB (cloud access security broker)
  • Devops
  • Solutions architect
  • Cloud governance
  • Cloud compliance
  • Cloud certified
  • Containerization
  • Etc…

You get the idea — we are looking for descriptors in a person’s profile. Once this is done, we can score the people we find by altering the traditional equation to include the TOTAL NUMBER OF KEYWORDS that were found in a person’s profile.

Seniority + Functional Title + TOTAL NUMBER OF KEYWORDS FOUND = SCORE

And that looks something like this:

You can see in this example, that all three of these executives score a perfect 100 because they have both the seniority and many of the keywords we use that tell us they are relevant to what we are selling.

Using seniority prioritizes those people in positions of decision making, while the total number of keywords gives you a tightly selected audience.  That is how we got a prospect’s list of Cloud Architects from 1,800 to approximately 50,000.  It is also how we got that prospect to become a client.

Stay tuned for a future installment of this blog series, we will walk you through a typical CRM audit designed to extend your audience inside any account you already have in your database by 40 – 60%.