You’ve most likely heard of demographic data, but what about firmographic data?
Chances are, you’ve probably dealt with a lot of firmographic data at some point or another–even if you didn’t realize it.
If demographic data is basically key data about target customers like their age or education, firmographic data provides information about companies. In the B2B world, digging deep into company profiles is key to taking your prospecting skills to another level, whether you’re in sales, marketing, recruiting, or any other industry.
According to Adobe, 72% of B2B customers expect fully or mostly customized personalized content when using products and services.
People have high expectations when it comes to personalization. Whether you’re a B2B prospect researching a product or service, a skilled job candidate, or even a C-suite level executive looking for other like-minded leaders, making connections with new leads is all about personalization. With the help of firmographics, you can find your ideal customers, send the right message that resonates, and turn leads into returning customers.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What is firmographic data?
- Firmographics data vs demographics
- Firmographic data types like technographics
- Benefits of firmographic segmentation and examples of how people use it IRL
- Firmographic data sources
- The best way to find firmographic data
What is firmographic data?
Firmographic simply means information about a firm or company in a categorized state. Firmographic data are the specific details about that company or organization used to filter or sort them like industry or revenue.
Anything you want to know about a company, such as industry type, company size, company annual revenue and performance, location, employee count, and other details that you can discover from firmographic data.
What is firmographic segmentation?
Firmographic type of data helps you group certain companies with similar characteristics into a market segment, whether you’re using firmographic data for sales outreach, marketing, recruiting, customer success outreach, or other use cases. The grouping of these characteristics is called segmentation.
Firmographic data can be both qualitative and quantitative; it’s basically the best of both worlds.
An example of quantitative firmographic data is a company’s financial report. This data is presented in numbers and they have mathematical meaning to present specific quantities of different details.
You can also find ordinal qualitative data with firmographics. Ordinal qualitative data is basically data that can be categorized and then ordered in a logical way. For example, company size is one type of firmographic data that’s considered ordinal qualitative data. You can get firmographic data on the size of your target companies and assign each company to small, medium, or large enterprises.
Firmographics vs demographics data
Firmographics data is basically the B2B SaaS version of demographic data. The same way that you need to know the different demographics of your target audience, sales teams and marketers also need to know specific information about specific companies in their target market to make sure they’re tailoring their marketing content, sales offers, and product messaging to the right people in the right way.
Demographic data provides insight into the type of people you’re targeting, but firmographic data provides insight about companies or organizations you’re targeting.
What is technographic data?
Another type of data you might usually find paired with firmographic data is technographic data. Technographic is basically information about a company’s software toolstack.
You can use technographic data for various different reasons, including:
- To learn what software a company in your target segment uses
- To understand how your product or service can enhance their current tool stack
- To discover what software tools your target company don’t have yet, but could benefit from
- To identify whether your software tool could potentially replace a tool in the company’s current tech stack
Whether you’re a marketer or a salesperson, understanding your target company’s tech stack can help you identify opportunities to personalize your product or service to that organization.
We’ll explain more about technographics and other types of firmographic data in the section below.
💡Want to learn how to use Seamless.AI to find technographic data? Visit our knowledge base to see how you can search for company contacts filtered by company technology.
Firmographic data types
Firmographic data is not limited to simple company details like name, industry, or location (which are important details, but usually accessible to the public!).
You can learn a lot more about a company with different types of firmographic data. The most common firmographic data types include:
- Industry
- Location
- Company size and years in business
- Company status and structure
- Customers and products
- Company annual revenue, performance, and growth trends
- Company technological stack AKA technographic data
Industry
This one’s a no-brainer. If you’re looking to reach out to companies in a specific industry, filtering firmographic data for companies based on industry can help you narrow your search to specific industries or related businesses.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by industry: Targeting companies that are categorized in healthcare, as well as businesses closely related to the healthcare industry.
Location
Searching for companies by industry gives you a general overview of your target companies, but searching for firmographic location data helps you narrow companies down to a specific place.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by location: Targeting companies only located in Atlanta, GA.
Company size and years in business
Maybe you’re looking to target small, mom-and-pop businesses or startups. Or maybe you’re looking for B2B leads that are giant enterprises. Company size is a type of firmographic data that helps you find prospects or leads based on how big or small a company is.
The main company size classifications in the B2B are:
- Small businesses or startups
- Mid-market companies
- Large enterprise businesses
Here’s an example of what size classifications can look like between small, medium and large businesses from Hubspot:
In the B2B world, the actual number of employees and revenue amounts for each business size classification can vary depending on how each industry defines company size data, but you can do a quick search on Google to figure out those numbers for your specific industry.
Knowing the number of years a company has been in business also helps signal how quickly or slowly a specific company has grown since it was started. For example, if you search for enterprise level businesses you might find that some enterprise orgs have scaled more quickly than others based on the number of years they’ve been in business.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by company size or years in business: Targeting companies that are considered startups and have only been in business for 5 years or less.
📗 Related: The TRUTH About Selling to Fortune 500 Companies
Status and structure
In addition to knowing a company’s size classification and years in business, learning a company’s legal status or structure is important.
The biggest reasons for knowing companies’ legal structure are tax implications and liability. There might be roadblocks around working with or servicing other businesses of a specific legal structure if they don’t align with your own business’s structure. It’s all about financial and legal obligations that a company is tied to.
Here are some of the different legal structures and status of companies you might encounter with this type of firmographic data:
- Individual firms
- Standalone entities
- Subsidiaries of larger organizations
- Limited liability corporations (LLC)
- Partnerships
- Publicly owned companies
- Privately held companies
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by legal structure: Targeting organizations that are only NGOs, charities, or nonprofits.
Customers and products
This type of firmographic data helps you understand your target companies’ customers and what they offer to their users. Maybe you’re looking for companies that have a similar customer base as your company, or maybe the product or service you’re selling works best for companies that have a particular product.
Knowing firmographic data on a company’s customers and products can help you craft your outreach with their best interests in mind.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by customers and products: Targeting companies that offer telehealth services for the elderly population.
Company annual revenue, performance, and growth trends
Want to evaluate whether a specific company is worth investing time and money into? Firmographic data on companies’ profitability and growth rate is useful for understanding a company’s past, current, and future performance.
Here’s what you need to know about this type of firmographic data:
- Company annual revenue: How much money a company generates in sales per year
- Growth rate: The speed at which a company expands in terms of revenue, employee count, or market share
Usually, you can easily find information about a large enterprise company’s annual revenue or performance online. Most big companies release annual revenue or end-of-year reports to the public, which anyone can access.
Small and medium businesses, on the other hand, might not release this information readily to the public. It’s hard to find data for small businesses.
Additionally, a lot of traditional B2B contact databases have pretty limited firmographic data for small and medium businesses. That’s when a sales lead intelligence tool like Seamless.AI comes in handy. You can use Seamless.AI’s live search engine tool to search for firmographic data on SMBs and filter for company annual revenue, performance, and growth trends.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by company revenue and growth: Targeting companies that have generated over $15 million in sales for the year with a targeted growth rate of 100%+ YoY ARR (year-over-year annual recurring revenue).
📘 Related: Want to learn how Seamless.AI’s firmographic data for SMBs compare to other top sales lead intelligence tools? Read about how Seamless.AI’s data compares to Lusha’s data.
Company technological stack
This type of firmographic data is particularly useful for B2B users. This type of firmographic data is also known as technographic data. Technographic data helps you identify what software tools a company is currently using, what tools they don’t have yet, and even opportunities to replace tools in the current tech stack with your own.
For example, maybe you’re a marketer for a UX research recruiting tool and you’re looking for other UX-focused companies. Using firmographic data to see the tech stacks of other UX-focused companies can help you understand what other UX tools they’re using, what tools they don’t have yet, and whether your UX research recruiting tool would be a good fit for their tech stack.
✨ Example of a firmographic market segment by tech stack: Targeting companies that use user experience recruiting, testing, and analysis tools.
Additional information to learn about companies
There are many top sales lead intelligence tools that provide the basic firmographic types of data, but there are a few that also provide supplemental information about your target companies that you might find useful.
While you can usually find your typical firmographic data like company size or location, there are other types of supplemental, qualitative information you can pair with firmographic data to gain a deeper understanding of your target leads.
You can use a lead intelligence tool with firmographic data to discover other types of information like:
- Company social media profiles
- Company intent data
- Employee changes within a company with a job changes tracker
- Keywords trending based on industry and company profiles
These are some examples of additional useful data paired with firmographics that Seamless.AI also provides within our real-time B2B search engine for lead contact data.
✍️Want to get free access to Seamless.AI’s B2B search engine for firmographic data? Get started with a free account and try it out for yourself.
6 Key benefits of firmographic segmentation
The firmographic approach, AKA firmographic segmentation, is popular among those looking for B2B customers. Firmographic segmentation is the process of organizing or classifying your segmented customers according to similar company data.
So why do people need firmographic segmentation? The best answer to this question heavily depends on who you are and how you aim to use firmographic information about companies or businesses you want to target.
However, the benefit of grouping target customers according to similar company data boils down to personalization. You can find strong leads with similar company backgrounds or details to make sure you’re targeting the right people with the right products or services.
With firmographic data and segmentation, you get more context–context on what products, values, challenges, needs, external motivations, and company-related factors affect your target customers’ behaviors. Firmographic data helps you identify ways your product or service can align with customers’ unique needs or challenges within the context of their company-wide business needs.
Here’s an overview of the main benefits of firmographic data and segmentation.
Firmographic data and segmentation helps you…
1. 🎯 Target potential customers more precisely and effectively.
The more you know about your customers, the more you can turn them into returning customers–over and over again.
And with firmographics, you can learn more about your customers by finding leads from businesses that align with your solutions. Finding your dream customers starts with understanding the context of wider organizational goals that their individual goals are tied to.
With detailed information on the most important companies you want to target, you can identify their unique challenges or pain points, needs, desires, motivation, and interests. These nuances allow you to craft messaging and offers that appeal directly to your target segments–helping you filter the noise of low-quality leads and turn the volume up on sales qualified leads.
More precise and accurate firmographic segmentation also streamlines your sales prospecting process. Rather than wasting time on researching your leads manually, you can get a big-picture view of what truly matters to potential customers.
2. 🤝 Identify potential partnerships and collaboration.
Finding your dream customers is a huge goal, but partnering up with other businesses in your industry is also a huge plus.
Firmographics help you identify the contacts at companies you want to start collaborating with. For example, setting up an integration with another software tool in your industry opens up a whole new avenue of potential, highly qualified leads. The customers of the other company would be more open to using your tool with an integration, and they also most likely align with your ideal customer profile as well.
3. ⚒️ Improve product development.
Every industry or company has unique needs or requirements. Building an industry-leading product requires you to understand industry or company needs.
With the help of firmographics, you can build out a product roadmap that takes those specific industry requirements into consideration. Every new feature, product message, or update can be tailored according to company profiles or industry nuances.
According to James Gibson, Digital Marketing Manager at CamSurf, firmographic data helps improve:
“...customization of product features, advantages, or promotional offers, [and] businesses have the ability to directly address the specific requirements and difficulties that are found in particular industries or types of companies.”
4. 📈 Improve risk assessment.
According to Ethan Keller, President of Dominion,
“When entering new markets or reaching out to specific sectors of your target market, firmographic information equips you with a better awareness of the financial stability, industry trends, and regulatory environments of the businesses you’re targeting”,
–helping you make more informed decisions and reducing potential risks.
More specifically, having access to company annual revenue, growth rate, and performance records are key to helping you gauge whether you want to pursue contacts from a specific company.
5. 💸 Reduce costs and optimize resource allocation.
When you spend more time pursuing your dream customers, you’re maximizing your use of time, money, and resources on the right people. A clear understanding of firmographic data helps you minimize the time or money wasted on low-quality leads through more precise and accurate targeting.
📗 Related: Targeting the Right Social Media Apps
6. 🙂 Increase overall customer satisfaction and retention.
Firmographic data not only benefits the person using firmographic data, but also the customer or target audience.
When you approach the right people with the best offers or solutions for their unique needs, prospects will be much more inclined to engage with you, build a relationship, and even become a returning customer.
Imagine a sales development representative reaches out to you with a solution that you’ve been searching high and low for, and they present it to you with a personalized offer that addresses all of our unique pain points. You would feel much more appreciative of them coming to you with exactly what you need and understanding your needs without you having to say no.
On the flip side, imagine you get a cold sales email promoting a product that doesn’t align with your needs. The chances of you even responding to that email are pretty low–maybe even zero.
The goal is to understand company and industry context so you can find the right customers, delight them with a solution, and continue learning about their evolving needs so you can continue to keep them happy.
Overall, segmenting your firmographic data is like making a sauce reduction. When you have so much information about your entire TAM (total addressable market), you’re dealing with a lot of data and customer profiles that need to be organized into different segments so you can prioritize the ones that are most important for your prospecting goals. Similarly with a sauce reduction, you usually start out with a mixed concoction of sauces, but the goal is to thicken and intensify the sauce to bring out the flavors of specific ingredients that are most important for your recipe.
It’s all about dividing and conquering your customers so you can glean the most high-priority, relevant information from each segment.
📗 Related: The Ultimate Guide to Sales Segmenting Email Campaigns
Examples of how people use firmographic data, IRL
While firmographic data is mostly used by marketing or sales teams to find B2B prospects, there are many other not-so-obvious use cases for company data in other aspects.
Here are some ways that firmographics are used in different scenarios.
Marketing teams can use company information for market segmentation and to further personalize content, messaging, and B2B campaigns that resonate better with their target companies’ unique needs.
📗 Related: How to Use Seamless.AI for Marketing
Sales teams or sales executives can use firmographics to prioritize leads that match their ICPs (AKA your dream customers) and craft better pitches that are more relevant to their target businesses.
According to Hayim Pinson, Founder & CEO at Muscle and Brawn,
“Businesses are able to more effectively deploy their resources when they have a better awareness of the characteristics of their target segments. This ability allows them to change their advertising channels, messaging, and promotional activities so that they are in line with the tastes and behaviors of certain businesses.”
To sum it up, the benefit of firmographic data for sales and marketing teams boils down to attracting their dream customers:
- Helps tailor your sales and marketing approach to specific audience segments
- Helps determine your ideal customer profile
- Helps with account-based marketing or sales approaches
📗 Related: How to Use Seamless.AI for Sales
Financial analysts, banks, and other financial institutions can use firmographic data for credit risk analysis or to gauge the investment potential of startups according to their performance history, stability, and industry positioning.
Supply chain managers can use firmographic data to vet potential suppliers to make sure they’re partnering with businesses that meet their demands for reliability and scale.
Cybersecurity experts can combine firmographic data with technographic data to assess the overall cybersecurity strength of potential tech vendors or partners. This use of data helps them anticipate any potential vulnerabilities based on a company’s industry or technological stack.
In the words of Max Shak, Founder and CEO of NerDigital.com, recruiting teams use firmographic data to find companies with cultures that align with their values and attract candidates who are likely to succeed in their environment. Firmographic information also helps recruiters identify regions or industries with concentrations of top talent.
Here’s a real example from Derek Bruce, HR & Operations Director, First Aid at Work, of how firmographic data has helped improve their talent management strategies:
“Implementing firmographic analysis…carved off 30% from our hiring cycle total time. Our employee turnover rate has also plummeted by 15%... We have reaped invaluable insights into our workforce demographics via firmographic data; in turn, these have paved the way to manifesting more diverse and inclusive hiring practices. Such adaptation has propelled a 20% increase in our workforce diversity within just two years - clear evidence displaying that firmographic data is at heart of shaping HR procedures as well as talent management strategies.”
📘 Related: How to Use Seamless.AI for Recruiting
Max Shak of NerDigital.com also points out that customer success teams use firmographic information to understand the unique challenges their clients face to anticipate their needs and provide solutions before issues arise. They can also use firmographic data to customize their customer training education programs to address specific pain points or industry-related challenges.
C-suite level executives also benefit from firmographic data by helping them identify other C-suite executives from target companies who would be strong potential partners for their business. Knowing who to identify also helps C-suite executives tailor their thought leadership messaging to signal to other leaders that they are a valuable contact or resource to have in the industry.
📘 Related: How to Find Any CEOs Contact Information
How to find firmographic data
You can find firmographic data from a variety of different sources, including:
- Self-reported data
- Derived data
- Verified data
The type of source that you choose to find target companies’ information depends on what you’re using the information for. One data source might be more up-to-date than others, while another could provide more depth of information.
✅ Here’s a mental checklist to keep in mind as you decide on a firmographic data source:
- How credible and accurate is the data from this source?
- Are the firmographics from this source up-to-date?
- Will this data source give me enough depth of information?
- Do my competitors have access to the same source?
- What are the financial and time costs of collecting firmographics from this source?
Again, not every firmographic data source is right for everyone. We’ll dive into the different types of firmographic data sources below.
Related: Learn more about sales intelligence software
Self-reported data
Self-reported firmographic data is information that companies voluntarily disclose about themselves. This data source may seem reliable since there’s no need for you to confirm whether the information is accurate or not; companies that self-report also self-check to make sure they’re giving the public the right information.
Here are some examples of where to find self-reported firmographic data:
- Company websites
- Government websites
- Paid research database websites
- Financial releases
- Public financial disclosures
- Investor relations pages
One thing to note is that self-reported firmographic data isn’t always up-to-date. There’s no telling when a company or a government source decides to update the public about their current information–they might only update it when they want the public to know about big changes.
If you only need to do a lightweight search of your target companies information, this data source might suffice for your needs. It only takes a quick Google search to find this information.
However, if you’re aiming to stand out from the crowd, solely relying on self-reported firmographic data might not give you the depth of insights you’re looking for.
Derived data
Derived firmographic data is company information and data collected from various third-party sources. This includes sources like:
- Industry publications
- News articles
- Social media like LinkedIn pages
- Trade journals
This type of data source can be helpful if you’re looking to keep a light finger on the pulse of the companies you’re targeting beyond what companies self-report. You’ll find that derived firmographic data provides more detail about what’s recently happened or happening with the companies you’re interested in.
However, derived firmographics are still information bits that are publicly available. It’s one step above doing a quick Google search on a few companies, but all it takes is some digging online on companies’ social media profiles or industry news sources to get a better picture of your target customers.
Verified data
Verified firmographic data is data that’s manually verified. This data source provides more accurate data compared to self-reported or derived firmographic data sources because they’re directly verifying and finding new details that you might not be able to find with self-reported or derived firmographic information.
Getting firmographic data from verified sources is also more timely. You can find the exact firmographic data you need when you need it–not just when the rest of the world (especially your competitors) finds out.
To top it off, the best part about verified firmographic data is that you usually don’t need to spend too much time doing your research on companies. Finding firmographic data shouldn’t have to take you hours of doing separate Google searches, exploring individual social media profiles, and drowning in a pile of public financial release records.
Here are some examples of verified firmographic data sources:
- Data from third-party aggregators, AKA B2B contact databases or firmographic data providers
- Direct company surveys
- Outreach programs
💡 If you’re looking for B2B leads, the best way to find accurate, complete, and up-to-date firmographic data is through a firmographic data provider like Seamless.AI. Firmographic data tools streamline the entire process of doing separate searches for every possible target company into a single platform view of all the information you’re looking for.
For example, with Seamless.AI you can find your dream customers by accessing real-time firmographic data for B2B contacts you want to target with powerful filters and segmentation. Getting firmographic data from Seamless.AI’s live search engine drastically cuts down the time it takes to manually research every contact, and you can do it at scale.
📘 Related: Explore our guide to the best prospecting tools.
Leveraging firmographic data to unlock valuable insights
To sum it up, having access to firmographic data is key to zooming in on your target audience based on company profiles. You can make more informed decisions on which companies you need to prioritize outreach for, stay ahead of your competitors, and consequently close more business deals with the right people.
Scoring leads with firmographic data puts you and your team on the right path to spending your outreach efforts where it matters most. Whether you’re in sales, marketing, financial analytics, or even recruiting, firmographic data will help you unlock valuable insights about your target market.
This type of data is crucial to your success, and that’s why we do what we do here at Seamless.AI. If you’re looking to spend more time actually having conversations with the right prospects while streamlining the process of building prospecting lists, try Seamless.AI. It’s free to sign up and you get 50 free credits to get started.
💡 Want to learn more about how Seamless.AI’s platform works to provide real-time B2B data? Check out some of our success stories with clients who have generated millions in revenue using Seamless.AI.
