The Complete Guide to Firmographic Data

With the advent of technology-driven ecosystems, we’ve come to learn that most of the things we see around us are driven by data. No wonder there’s a constant struggle for companies that are trying to improve the reach and reliability of data about their customers and clients.

The problem is supply. We all can agree that if we have information about individuals such as demography and their likings, we can easily enhance the marketing and sales outcome. We can also include firmographics, a dataset that helps businesses efficiently segment organizations into meaningful segments.

In this article, you will learn about firmographic. We will dig deeper into firmographic data and its key forms and functions, explore how it is used for segmentation, and the types of questions that can help your company locate and leverage firmographic data.

What is firmographic data?
Data related to demographics focus on information that is associated with individuals. For example data such as contact name and their purchase preferences. These data parameters are demographic assets that can be used to drive a well-targeted marketing campaign.

In the case of firmographic data, the focus shifts to organizations, firms, etc., collecting and analyzing vital information about the operations of these organizations. Firmographic data include:

Industry type — Be it legal service firms, manufacturing, logistics or financial services, industry type is a key vector for categorization. However, there are some companies that have more than one company vertical and can also belong to multiple firmographic segments.
Organizational size — What is the size of the organization, both in terms of staff size and physical location?
Total sales and revenue — Information about a quarter and annual revenue are relevant here. As revenue data and annual sales can aid in compiling a long-term sales strategy, quarterly results can aid companies in pinpointing more immediate needs.
Current location — Where is the organization’s headquarters located? How many offices do they have and where are they located?
Ownership framework — Is the organization a private or a public organization? Or is it an NGO, charity or non-profit? Each has its own unique market approach.
Growth trends — Is it a growing company, downsizing, or is it capable of maintaining its current market position? All three metrics offer different opportunities and must be approached in different ways.

There could be situations where demographic and firmographics data may crossover as it relates to specific job roles, titles, departments, and potential buying power.

By understanding more about the decision-makers in an organization along with the operational framework that surrounds them, businesses can target their marketing efforts to those audiences who have the power to take action immediately.

Benefits of Firmographic Segmentation
The primary goal of firmographic data is to help organizations categorize potential B2B customers into meaningful segments.

For example, if your C-suites, sales, and marketing teams had access to this segmented data that classifies prospects by location, size, revenue, or current growth trajectory, they will not require time and effort separation this data before making any decisions. Instead, potential buyers are pre-sorted into relevant categories.

Segmentation offers specific benefits for organizations, such as:

1. Improved market targeting.
When you understand the physical and market size of potential customers you can significantly improve your sales targeting efforts. Let’s assume, Smaller, “pop, and mom” businesses do not have the same needs as a large enterprise. While both of them are valuable clients, their paths from initial contact to sales conversions would be different. For example, SMBs want one-stop solutions to help reduce total complexities, many enterprises are after custom-built solutions to help them address specific issues.

2. Enhanced customer service.
Key firmographic data about a company’s location and the information about their employee’s geographic distribution can help customers improve their service offerings. Let’s consider a logistics company located entirely within a single state. So there are chances that they will prioritize partners who can deliver local services. On the other hand, multinational companies often prefer on-demand distributed digital services.

3. Long-term buying potential.
Companies that are growing offer potential for B2B businesses to enjoy increased conversion volume over time. Companies that are downsizing also come with sales potential but also require a different approach with services that are both cost-effective and in short term and can scale over time as revenue targets evolve.

Key Firmographic Questions
So how do you compile firmographic data relevant to your brand and drive corporate success? The first step is to ask the right questions. Listed below are some of the most common questions:

• When was the company founded?
• How many employees in total does the company have?
• How many staff are there at each office or satellite location?
• What is the company’s revenue per year?
• What percentage of their target market share does the company currently have?
• Are they currently in a growth phase, downsizing, or remaining relatively consistent?
• What does their organizational structure look like (flat leadership, standard hierarchy, etc.)

When collecting firmographic data you have basically had three options. Survey companies conduct online surveys or purchase firmographic information from a data clearinghouse or similar service.

All these three have their sets of pros and cons. For example, with surveys offering the most accurate firmographic information, many companies prefer not to share their data, especially if your someone who takes a cold call approach.

Meanwhile, online searches can help in getting firmographic data but there’s no guarantee about its relevance and accuracy. Data gathered this way depends heavily on the source and the date the information was obtained.

Purchasing data from a reputed seller provides accurate and up-to-date information but it could cost a lot and it’s worth cross-referencing this information with publicly available sources to ensure sellers are accurate consistently.

Finding a Firm(ographic) Foundation
When data is acquired timely, accurately, and efficiently, the demographic, technographic, and firmographic data accumulated can help B2B organizations create personalized sales and marketing strategies and can effectively improve the overall conversion rate.

To make sure that a firmographic framework can deliver the desired results, it is critical for companies to focus on segmentation forms and decision-making functions.

When the right question is asked, accurate segmentation of potential customers is done using this data to inform sales and marketing efforts, companies can drastically reduce the time between information and action while simultaneously increasing sales success.

If you are looking for data services, then you have come to the right place. Book a demo with us today!