Firmographic Data
What is Firmographic Data?
Attributes of firmographic data
Firmographic data consists of all the characteristics that can be used to describe and categorize a business. These can be on a macro scale, like size and industry, or on a micro scale like revenue and sales cycle length.
Some of the key attributes of firmographic data include:
- The legal status of the company (publicly owned, privately owned, non-profit, NGO, Inc., LLC.)
- The location of the various branches of the company (region, country, state, city, zip code, address)
- The company’s industry (SIC classification codes)
- Company size (including revenue, number of employees, SME)
- Performance (sales cycle length, sales numbers, quarterly and annual profits, credit rating)
- Company structure (headquarters, parent companies, subsidiaries)
As you can see, firmographic data really provides a comprehensive description of every aspect that it might be beneficial to know about a company.
What’s important for you is to identify which attributes will be of most use for you depending on the type of business you’re interacting with. Businesses can each have their own unique style: a Fortune 500 company will not operate in the same way as a small, young start up.
Sources of firmographic data
However, some crucial firmographic information, like that which is not required to be shown by law or for companies based in untransparent countries, is much harder to access. Indeed, sourcing even just basic
firmographics yourself can take up a lot of time and resources, and that’s not accounting for these difficult cases.
Because of this, most companies will turn to data providers to collect and present the firmographic data for them. In many cases, even large firmographics firms will use data from smaller companies to bolster their own available information!
Use Cases
Firmographic data can be crucial for the personalization of content. It can be used to formulate the following factors, creating advertisements in social media targeting a sector, creating effective blog posts to influence the market, creating newsletters and email campaigns for companies, A/B testing, creation of study materials and tutorials for a specific company.
However, all of this is done within the context of if the company is a potential prospect, a current client, or an existing supplier.
Here is a list of how the use cases of firmographic data fit into your understanding of all the companies you’re involved with:
Understanding Your Current Customers
For example, you may not know that a current customer company has recently increased its number of employees by a substantial amount. Firmographic data can find this out for you as soon as it is happening and without you even needing to ask. by looking at which departments the company is growing in, you can determine if you’ll need to adjust your categorization of this customer and if perhaps you could upsell them more of your products.
Evaluating Your Existing Suppliers
By using firmographics, you can check changes to the size, performance, and revenue of your existing suppliers, letting you know if they’re good to keep or if it’s time to find a new source.
Assessing Future Prospects
An example of using firmographics here is to categorize and segment potential prospects by firmographic attributes, e.g. country, industry, and size. You can then further differentiate them by how they behave, as shown by their revenue and sales cycle length.
This information will allow you to only engage with companies in the market you’re interested in (shown by location and industry) and who could afford your product/service (shown by budget, size, revenue). You’ll also gain an idea of how the interaction with the company will go by understanding its size and sales cycle length.
Thus, it’s very clear how acquiring firmographics is a must if you’re looking to create appropriate and reliable future B2B relationships.
Data Enrichment
Despite having uses of its own (as mentioned above), a use case of firmographics that cannot be overlooked is how valuable it is when enriching other data sets. Indeed, by using firmographics to enrich existing data, you can make its own use cases stronger.
Firmographic data is often used to enrich other B2B data types, likeintent data, B2B contact data or technographic data.
To use these data types in an example, you might have already acquired technographic data and implemented it to find a company that has a technology stack which has a gap that your product can fill. Intent data can then show you when this company is looking to fill the gap, and B2B contact data can ensure you reach the right person within that company. Now you can use firmographic data to learn more about how the company works and how the sales process will unfold, including information like its revenue and sales cycle length.
Now in order to undergo this valuable enrichment process, you the firmographic data must have a match key that can connect it with similar data points in your existing data sets. Make sure there is a match key and that this is suitable for your existing data sets, and you’re good to go.
Pricing
The pricing can also be influenced by the type of the industry, size of the companies, location clusters and the niches that are being targeted by the client. This is because acquiring data for certain industries or places may be more difficult than in others.
Before you commit to investing on a pricing model, you should ask for a data sample to assess the validity, the quality, and the impact it can have for your intended use case. Most major data providers will be happy to provide a data sample.
