The Complete Guide to Firmographic Data for Sales and 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.

55% of marketers don’t have sufficient customer data to use effective personalization. Luckily, firmographic data can help.

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’re going to walk you through what firmographic data is, the benefits of using it, 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.

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
  • Company size
  • Revenue
  • Location

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

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.

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?

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?

  • $0-50K
  • $51K-100K
  • $100K-500K
  • $500K-1MM

Industry

What industry does the company operate in?

  • SaaS
  • eCommerce
  • FMCG
  • Manufacturing

Type of Business and Customer Type

  • B2C
  • B2B
  • B2G
  • Non-profit
  • Public
  • Private

Location of HQ

  • 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 be personalizing 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Databases decay by a significant % every year

For example, at DemandScience, we verify data using our Contact Validation Score (CVS) and only include data that is 95% likely to be 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 41+ million validated B2B contacts on our platform.

Using DemandScience to Souce Accurate Firmographic Data

If you’re ready to start using Firmographics to boost your sales and marketing efforts, DemandScience is for you.

You’ll have instant access to +41 million business contacts and will be able to filter by firmographic criteria, as well as demographics and technographics.

Our data is cross-referenced with government registries, postal records, and we use email verification technology to validate emails and do manual checks on our direct-dials.

Wrapping Up

Firmographic data is a powerful way to improve your sales prospecting, messaging, and ad targeting.

You’ll be able to identify good-fit leads without worrying about sending emails to companies who won’t be interested in your product or service.

Ready to start using firmographics to improve your lead generation efforts?

Get in touch with us today.