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ExtraHop uses Predictive Insights to strategically pursue the mid-market

Cloud-native cybersecurity company gains clear picture of high-propensity accounts in a new market segment, allowing sales and marketing to drive quality pipeline

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Cloud-native cybersecurity company ExtraHop traditionally pursued enterprise accounts, but with shifting demand in the marketplace and changes to competitors’ strategy, they sensed opportunity in the mid-market. They wanted to use a data-driven approach to building their non-enterprise account list and make sure they only targeted high-fit prospects. Using Anaplan Predictive Insights, they were able to determine where to focus sales and marketing resources to have the greatest impact.

Anaplan Predictive Insights is one of the key components of our ABM strategy and guides all of our marketing and sales tactics.

Jes Hagen, Senior Marketing Campaign Manager

When cybersecurity firm ExtraHop sensed opportunity in the mid-market, they knew it was time to expand their go-to-market strategy.Having targeted large enterprises exclusively in the past, they had a clear impression of what attributes constituted a promising large account. Their understanding of what made a smaller account a good fit for their products was a bit fuzzier. Because the universe of accounts in the mid-market gets much larger, this understanding was a critical component in their strategy change.

Sales needed to prioritize their time and marketing looked to optimize their spend, so they wanted to make sure they were pursuing the right accounts. ExtraHop sought a way to align sales and marketing while effectively focusing their efforts.

ExtraHop杠杆Anaplan预测洞察力to identify high-propensity mid-market accounts. To accomplish this, they built a predictive model based on closed/won accounts that combined first-party account data in their CRM with Predictive Insights’ extensive third-party database.

Once they identified the characteristics of an ideal account within their mid-market segment, ExtraHop was ready to build their account list. With access to Predictive Insights’ database of millions of businesses worldwide, they quickly filled their own database with net-new high-propensity accounts. With these new targets in hand, ExtraHop was able to optimize sales territories by prioritizing outreach efforts. Likewise, this list guided their award-winning marketing team in the creation of digital ads and content syndication campaigns.

Using Anaplan, ExtraHop found that mid-market accounts with the highest predictive ranks were five times more likely to reach 50% in the opportunity stage. The improvement has advanced ExtraHop’s efforts in this new segment and strengthened their overall pipeline. Moreover, leveraging advanced technographic and intent data surfaced by Predictive Insights to guide their sales outreach and marketing activities has resulted in a 3.8 times larger average deal size across segments.

Jes Hagen, Senior Marketing Campaign Manager at ExtraHop, puts it this way: “Anaplan Predictive Insights is one of the key components of our ABM strategy and guides all of our marketing and sales tactics.” She also notes that the net-new account discovery tool within Predictive Insights, called Market Analyzer, has been invaluable. Sales lead volume had decreased with COVID-19 market disruptions and canceled industry events, but Market Analyzer has helped to make up for the decrease and enabled reps to prioritize their outreach efforts.

Anaplan has been pivotal to ExtraHop’s go-to-market strategy, not just for account prioritization but also for the valuable intent data it surfaces. Information about an account’s current installed base and technologies used has enabled marketing to create compelling offers and sales to have engaging conversations with prospects. “Both account prioritization and intent data provide our SDR team with laser focus that is perfectly aligned with our marketing team,” says Meghan Foley, VP of Inside Sales. “Leveraging intent data improved our conversion rates for cold outbound prospecting and opened up the dark funnel with actionable insights.”

In the future, ExtraHop plans to leverage Anaplan Predictive Insights’ data enrichment capabilities to enhance their understanding of prospects further and enable them to be hyper-targeted in their campaigns. Likewise, they are keen to leverage the global database of accounts to guide their expansion into markets beyond North America.