How to use Spend Estimates

As you click through various company reports, you will notice a trend: the companies with the largest digital footprint spend the most. (and vice versa)

So how can you put this data into action?

First, let’s get to know how the number is calculated. Spend is combination of:

1. Applications used

2. Use Case

3. Cloud Services 

4. Usage

5. Price

Spend provides the clearest estimate of a company’s online presence. 

Most companies have processed built around a company’s size or revenue. The problem with these archaic data points is major opportunities get missed such as a big company with no spending power, or a small company with incredible spending power. You won’t see this through an Employee or Revenue number.

Now to start leveraging Spend, let’s look at one company: Shopify

According to Intricately, Shopify spends roughly $1M per month on infrastructure. 

This tells us that Shopify operates a very large digital presence. If you’ve been following Shopify, you will know they offer a SaaS eCommerce platform, and they have been growing at an incredible rate. Both traits support this large spend amount.

The next set of spend data that we want to look at is the category spend. Category spend unveils the products that any company spends the most on. 

If we take a look at Shopify again, we see that they spend roughly $2M per month on CDN and it’s split amongst 7 providers with Cloudflare owning most of the spend.

If you’re looking to sell into Shopify, it’s likely more effective to target an incumbent that isn’t Cloudflare. You could look at Varnish, NGINX, or Akamai.

Digging deeper, we can see exactly how one of these CDN providers is used by clicking on the logo:

This tells us that Shopify uses Cloudflare to power its app's domains. This is an incredible insight you can pull into any sales conversation. 

Spend as a Relative Indicator of Fit

It’s important to look at spend as a relative indicator. The quickest way for you to establish your spend basis is to look at the last few customers you signed, and their spend numbers. This will provide a baseline to look for when prospecting.

If you have more questions about spend, don’t hesitate to reach out to schedule a one-on-one call.

Using Spend Tier Estimates

As you click through company reports or export Smart Lists or Imported List enrichments to CSV, you'll see spend expressed in tiers:

Spend tiers in a Smart List

Spend tiers in a report export

Spend tiers give you a quick way to group accounts with similar magnitudes of spend into the same bucket for further analysis. Spend tiers are designed to help you identify similar accounts and get a rough sense of how a company's spend compares to its peers -- tiers are not intended to convey absolute dollar values.

Interested in accessing detailed spend values? Our Detailed Spend Data Edition includes spend amounts by provider, category, and company. Contact us at support@intricately.com to learn more.