A Complete Guide to Firmographic Data for Sales & Marketing

Consistent lead flow is the key to successful long-term growth. If your lead pipeline starts to dry up, you’re in big trouble. 

Being able to identify qualified prospects quickly is crucial if you want to ensure your sales team has a prospect list to work with, and your pipeline stays full. 

Businesses that leverage data-driven personalization strategies have seen a staggering 5-8x of ROI growth. Firmographic data is your launchpad towards successful personalized campaigns. This data equips sales professionals with the essential insights required to pinpoint these target clients. 

Firmographic data is crucial to ensure your team spends their time focusing on leads and companies who are well qualified for your product or service and to ensure your messages are as relevant as possible to your audience. 

In this article, we will walk you through what firmographic data is, its benefits, and how you can apply it to your sales and marketing efforts. Let’s jump in. 

What Is Firmographic Data? 

Firmographic data, or firmographics, is the set of characteristics used to segment companies and organizations into defined groups. Organizations collect firmographics to gain a better understanding of their target audience and to effectively provide products, services, and solutions. This data encompasses comprehensive details regarding a company’s size, industry sector, geographical location, ownership structure, annual revenue, employee count, and more. 

By leveraging this information, businesses can segment their target markets and tailor their marketing and sales approaches accordingly. Additionally, firmographics can help companies pinpoint opportunities and trends within particular markets. This extensive information is a vital resource for any B2B sales professional or marketer. 

Just like we have demographics for people or technographics for technology, firmographics allows you to group companies by unique identifiers. 

It’s particularly useful for B2B teams who want to quickly identify and engage with qualified leads who are most likely to benefit from your product or service. 

Some examples of firmographic data include: 

• Industry 

• Revenue 

• Company size 

• Location 

However, there are a lot more attributes you can use, and we’ll show you those in the next section. 

What are the Benefits of B2B Firmographic Data? 

Firmographic data enhances B2B sales by providing insights into target customers, such as company size, location, and industry. This information allows sales teams to create tailored strategies and better understand the customer’s buying journey for increased sales. 

Firmographic data plays a crucial role in refining marketing strategies, personalizing sales approaches, and significantly enhancing customer service experiences. One of the primary advantages is enhanced targeting. Firmographic data empowers organizations to identify and reach potential customers with greater precision by analyzing factors such as industry, company size, or revenue. This targeted approach ensures that marketing efforts are directed toward the most promising leads. 

Additionally, improved customer segmentation is another key benefit. By categorizing companies based on specific firmographic criteria, businesses can develop more focused and effective marketing campaigns that resonate with distinct segments of their audience. This level of personalization can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. 

Moreover, strategic sales planning is made easier with firmographic insights. Sales teams can tailor their pitches to align with the unique needs and challenges of each prospective customer, thereby increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes. 

Firmographic Data vs. Demographic Data

Both firmographic and demographic data play pivotal roles in helping businesses gain insights into their target audiences. Both help you better understand your audience. However, the fundamental distinction between the two lies in their specific focus areas.  

Firmographic data focuses on organizations and businesses, rather than individuals. It provides insights into a company’s characteristics, such as industry type, size of the organization, revenue, geographical location, ownership structure, and growth trends. This type of information is particularly vital for B2B marketing strategies, enabling companies to effectively segment their audiences based on factors that are directly relevant to their business goals. For instance, understanding a company’s size or annual revenue can help determine which products or services would best suit its needs. 

In contrast, demographic data shifts the focus to individuals or groups of individuals. Common demographic attributes include age, gender, education level, and income. This data is predominantly utilized for B2C interactions, allowing businesses to create detailed customer profiles that reflect the preferences and behaviors of their target market. For example, a B2C company might use demographic data to tailor messaging based on age groups or income levels. For B2B marketers, compliance with privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) limits the use of demographic data, as personal information about decision-makers or employees cannot be directly targeted without explicit consent. However, broad demographic insights (such as job titles, seniority levels, or professional roles) can still play a role in building personas and guiding content strategies without violating privacy laws. 

While demographic data helps B2C companies tailor their messaging to individual consumers, firmographic data allows B2B companies to target businesses based on the characteristics of the organization, ensuring compliance and relevance.

Examples of Firmographic Data

There’s so much B2B data out there, but firmographic data is relatively narrow in scope. 

Essentially, it’s anything that you can use to group a company into a category that your sales and marketing team would find useful.  It encompasses demographic information such as organization size, employee count, and location, along with financial metrics like revenue and profits. Understanding these factors aids in market segmentation, targeting, and gauging business performance. 

Let’s take a look at some of the broad categories and types of firmographic data they include. 

Company Size 

How big is the company? This metric is vital for understanding customer segments and competitive landscapes. Analyzing employee count trends enhances targeting and outreach strategies. 

For example, you might want to filter companies by employee count: 

• 1-10 

• 11-49 

• 50-11 

• 101-500 

• 500+ 

Revenue 

How much monthly revenue does the company generate? Firmographic data helps measure revenue and identify ideal customer bases, enabling tailored sales and marketing strategies. 

• $0-50K 

• $51K-100K 

• $100K-500K 

• $500K-1MM 

Industry, Business and Customer Type 

What industry does the company operate in? Essential for lead generation and competitor research, firmographics reveal target company size, industry, and purchasing behaviors, offering a competitive edge. 

• SaaS 

• eCommerce 

• FMCG 

• Manufacturing 

Location of HQ 

Geographic data helps businesses optimize resources and identify growth areas. Detailed location information allows for predicting customer behavior and crafting targeted campaigns. 

• London 

• Berlin 

• New York 

• Chicago 

How to Use Firmographic Data for Lead Generation 

As you can see, firmographics make it easy to identify good-fit prospects. 

Once you start using firmographic data to guide marketing and sales decisions, you’ll see a range of benefits. 

1. Quickly Identify Qualified Sales Leads 

Once you start incorporating firmographic data into your sales workflow, identifying qualified prospects is a breeze. 

You can use tools like DemandScience to filter and identify companies that fit your requirements instantly. 

Is your solution relevant to B2B SaaS companies doing over $500K ARR, and you only want to see companies based in Austin, Chicago, and NYC? In a few clicks, you’ll see every company that fits your requirements. 

DemandScience makes it easy for any company to scale up its lead generation efforts using technographic data to help identify prospects and guide decision-making. 

2. Improve Sales and Marketing Messaging 

Personalization delivers 5-8x more ROI on marketing spend than generic messaging.  You need to personalize every marketing and sales message you can. 

If a prospect doesn’t think your email or call is relevant, they’re not going to be in touch with you again. 

Once you start using firmographic data, you’ll be able to talk to prospects and provide more value than ever. 

Having an understanding of your prospects’ revenue growth, company size, locations, and other vital information will allow your team to send them relevant information about your company, and personalize their sales pitches and marketing communications. 

3. Optimize Your Ad Targeting 

Advertising based on assumptions is hard. If you make the wrong assumptions, you’ll be wasting money, advertising to uninterested audiences. If you misjudge your target audience, you risk squandering resources on individuals who have no interest in your product or service. Technographic data can help. 

After you find data on your ideal prospects, you can then use your data to target your ads more effectively. 

For example, if you’re running ads on LinkedIn, you can target audiences with several different types of firmographic data. 

If you want to take it a step further, you can. 

You can use DemandScience’s database to identify companies that fit the firmographic requirements to be classed as a lead, then add those companies directly to your LinkedIn audience. 

That way, you know your money is being spent wisely. The decision-makers you care about will see your campaigns, and you won’t be wasting resources on unqualified prospects. 

Where Is Firmographic Data Sourced? 

Firmographic data is usually available somewhere. It’s not always clear where to find it, though. 

If you’re looking to start using firmographic data, it’s worth noting that your data should be sourced (and used) in a GDPR-compliant way. 

With that said, here are the most common ways to source firmographic data.  Here are a few main ways that firmographics are sourced: 

Derived Data

Derived data is anything that you learn from sources that aren’t explicitly there to share the data but include it anyway. 

It’s not necessarily trustworthy, as it hasn’t been manually verified, but it can give you some indication of a company’s firmographic profile. 

This could be things like photos of a company team on social media, and you learn how many employees they have, or a company announcing they’ve hit a certain MRR. 

Self-Reported Data

Self-reported data is anything that a company discloses about itself. This could be data included on company websites, public company registers, tax declarations, or similar. 

You could scrape these sources using automation, but unless you then manually verify the data, it’s still not extremely useful. 

Things can change quickly within a business, and the available self-reported data may be out of date (for example, if it has been several months since their tax declaration, their numbers will have changed since then). 

Verified Data

Verified data is the most specific and trustworthy type of B2B data. Most B2B data vendors, like DemandScience, are a source of verified data. It’s usually time and resource-intensive to source. It usually involves manual verification by emailing or phoning people and companies. 

If you don’t have a dedicated data sourcing and verification team, using a trusted B2B data provider is a more resource-efficient option. 

Choosing a Firmographic Data Provider

When it comes to sourcing firmographic data, you’re going to need a good provider. Sourcing and validating the data yourself is an inefficient use of time and resources. 

When choosing your firmographic data provider, there are a few key questions you should ask: 

Where Do They Source Their Data? 

You need to make sure that their data is GDPR-compliant and fit for business use. Finding out where and how they source their data is key. 

Good data providers will usually have information about their data-sourcing practices available on their website. 

If a data vendor doesn’t want to share any information on how their data is sourced, it’s a bad sign. The data wasn’t sourced in a GDPR-compliant manner, or may not be trustworthy. 

How Often Is the Data Cleaned and Validated? 

Databases decay by 20% every year, so you need to ask them about their data cleaning and validation practices. 

Data deprecation is an ongoing challenge. Safeguard your business against this insidious threat and establish a data-driven route to success. Our Verification Intelligence uses our Contact Validation Score (CVS) and only includes data that is likely to be highly accurate. Any lower, and it gets removed or re-verified. 

How Much Data Is Available? 

B2B data vendors differ in size. Some focus on a hyper-niche market and will have a smaller database, but others like DemandScience cover nearly every market. 

We currently have 200+ million validated B2B contacts on our platform.

Partnering with DemandScience to Source Accurate Firmographic Data

You’ll have instant access to millions of buyers and will be able to filter by firmographic criteria, as well as technographics. Our extensive data ecosystem provides in-depth insights into the technology utilized by various organizations, facilitating accurate targeting and tailored marketing strategies. We assist partner clients with strategic account targeting. This data is essential for developing pitches that directly address the challenges and requirements stemming from specific technological contexts. 

Additionally, our comprehensive database can improve lead scoring by incorporating technographic information, thereby enhancing lead quality and prioritization. With a clearer understanding of your audience and clients, your sales team can engage them with the appropriate message at the optimal moment. 

Wrapping Up

B2B firmographic data allows you to know your audience and understand your clients.  Leveraging this data is a powerful way to improve your sales prospecting, messaging, and ad targeting. You’ll be able to identify good-fit leads without wasting resources on companies that are unlikely to be interested in your product or service. 

Ready to start using B2B firmographic data to improve your lead generation efforts?