Firmographic data essentially refers to the demographics of a business. It encompasses key characteristics and attributes of businesses and organizations.
Just as B2C companies rely on demographic information such as gender and age to track consumer interests and buying habits, B2B businesses use firmographic data such as industry, location, company size, or type to understand their prospective clients.
Why do I need firmographic data?
In this age of globalization, efficiency is of the utmost importance. Companies are switching to targeted approaches to find prospects in a timely and accurate manner.
Firmographic data from past and current clients allows you to gain a better understanding of your ideal customer profile. Knowing who is most likely to purchase products allows you to improve your market segmentation, prioritize leads, and personalize propositions for future clients.
Improve Market Segmentation
One of the key pillars of a business is understanding the client. A one-size-fits-all approach no longer works when it comes to marketing because different companies have different needs. Some of the basic factors that influence your prospects include industry, location, company size, and company type.
Companies from the education sector will need different tools compared to those in the mining industry. Proximity and ease of access to a service may affect a company’s purchasing decisions if transportation costs or constant visits are involved. Smaller companies usually want flexible tools that will meet basic needs, whereas larger companies want services with robust, advanced features. Government agencies and non-profit organizations tend to have strict rules and regulations, which may lead to longer sales cycles and lower conversions. In contrast, private companies and sole proprietorships have the flexibility to make financial decisions quickly.
With accurate and current firmographic data, you may notice that most of your clients share an industry or are roughly the same size. By identifying the characteristics of your consumer base, you can create an ideal customer profile for lead prioritization.
Prioritize Leads
After creating an ideal customer profile based on the firmographic data of your client base, you can prioritize your leads according to specific criteria.
If you have an industrial automation company where the majority of your clients hail from the automotive industry, prioritizing prospects in the automotive or manufacturing industry would be more beneficial than attempting to engage someone in the entertainment niche. Since providing industrial automation involves the transport of machinery, a prospect halfway around the world would rank much lower than one in a neighboring state. Medium and large-sized organizations that have better purchasing power would rank higher because machine automation often incurs high costs.
By ranking your leads, you can spend more time on engaging prospects that have a higher possibility of sales, while keeping an eye on potential customers that have not met all the criteria of your ideal customer profile yet.
Personalize Propositions
Well-tailored value propositions attract better leads and improve customer acquisition. One of the ways to create a good proposition is to personalize it, addressing the specific needs and concerns of a prospective client.
Showcase your product by highlighting industry-specific use cases and solutions. Use relevant terminology and examples from the same industry to build up your credibility with customers.
If your company is looking to expand worldwide, you can attract prospective clients by offering localized content and customer service for each country. By incorporating cultural nuances and addressing region-specific regulations, you can show your commitment to understanding and working with the client.
When it comes to smaller companies, you can highlight affordability and ease of use. Meanwhile, medium to large organizations will appreciate being offered scalable services that can grow with the company.
Address compliance or regulatory adherence when engaging with public companies and government agencies to establish trust. Meanwhile, you should include cost efficacy as a main talking point when it comes to private companies and nonprofits that may have budgetary restrictions.
By navigating your prospect’s concerns in each value proposition, you can demonstrate your understanding of their needs, thus improving your credibility and increasing the likelihood of customer acquisition.
Where can I get firmographic data?
Company Websites
Certain information is easily accessible via company websites. Most businesses will list their address in their ‘About’ or ‘Contact’ pages, thus giving you an idea of where they are located. Large companies often choose to include information about their number of employees, their industry, and revenue on their websites to enhance their credibility in the eyes of their customers. Multinational organizations also usually have a page dedicated to the locations of their head offices in each country.
While the data on company websites are generally up-to-date, each site is structured differently and the information may be on different pages. Data related to investors and funding may also be in downloadables instead of on the page, so a little bit of patience and effort is required to unearth this information.
Public Records
Businesses have to register in their home country upon establishment. Most countries make their databases of registered companies a matter of public record and allow regular people to access the information online. You can look up a business by searching for its name on these sites. Most of the records include general information about a company’s industry, location, and business registration number.
Unfortunately, these databases are generally not updated in real time because companies must make a formal request for the information to be changed. The process may take several months before the updated data can be seen on the website. In addition, not every registry offers information about company size or type. The type of industry listed tends to be broader as well, leading to a lack of specificity.
Surveys & Interviews
Asking companies to fill in a survey or interviewing key decision-makers are also good ways to get accurate firmographic data. There are many firmographic data survey templates available online but you can also choose to make your own. If you can land an interview with someone who knows the company’s ins and outs, you can fill in any information gaps quickly and accurately.
Surveys may suffer from low or slow response rates, with businesses filling out the forms months later. In addition, not every organization is comfortable responding to surveys or interviews especially if they are approached without a pre-existing relationship. As a result, this approach can be quite time-consuming.
Data Providers
For quick, accurate, and up-to-date data, there are data providers. These websites offer a large amount of information on company profiles with accuracies that range from 95-99%. While some of them have data based solely on companies in North America, others boast information from millions of companies worldwide.
Large corporations who have the money to spare often opt for data providers because they can provide more market intelligence. However, smaller enterprises may not be able to afford the high cost of these datasets.
Sapiengraph
Sapiengraph is a Google Sheets add-on that allows users to retrieve key firmographic data about companies through several easy Google Sheets formulas.
All you need is the LinkedIn profile URL of the company and Sapiengraph will fetch data from public sources like LinkedIn and Crunchbase, putting them directly into your Google Sheet.
This method is simpler compared to searching company websites and public records, less time-consuming than surveys and interviews, and more affordable than buying data from a data provider.
How do I use Sapiengraph for firmographic data?
Sapiengraph’s integration with Google Sheets means that you can get some key firmographic data points by using a few formulas. Let us take a look at how to retrieve information about a company’s industry, location, company size, and company type.
Industry
Use the formula for company profile enrichment (=SG_COMPANY) in addition to the ‘industry’ attribute to learn about a particular organization’s niche. There are a total of 786 possible values for this attribute, covering a broad variety of sectors and very specific niches across the globe.
Credits: 1/industry
Formula: =SG_COMPANY(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL,"industry")
Location
With specific location attributes, you can customize the level of detail you want regarding a company’s location. If you’re just looking for a general location, using the ‘state’ or ‘country’ attribute will get you what you need. If you need something a little more detailed, you can use ‘line_1’ to get a company’s street address or ‘postal_code’ to get their postcode.
Credits: 1/location attribute
Formula: =SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “state”)
You can mix and match the data you want, retrieving only details about the state and country. It is also possible to consolidate all the information about a company’s location in a single cell by using the & symbol and repeating the formula with different attributes.
Credits: 1/location attribute
Formula: =SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “line_1”)& “, ”&SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “postal_code”)& “, ”&SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “city”)& “, ”&SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “state”)& “, ”&SG_COMPANY_LOCATIONS(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL, “country”)
Company Size
Sapiengraph offers two formulas to retrieve the size of a company. The first formula is based on internal metrics and provides a ballpark figure for the number of employees at a company. Since this formula only counts public profiles, the number might be different from the one listed on the organization’s LinkedIn profile.
Credits: 1/company size
Formula: =SG_COMPANY(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL","company_size")
If you want a total employee count, you can retrieve that information using the attribute “company_size_on_linkedin”, which will fetch the number of employees listed on the company’s profile.
Credits: 1/company size
Formula: =SG_COMPANY(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL","company_size_on_linkedin")
Company Type
If you need a deeper understanding of company type and possible customer concerns, you can fetch information about a company’s type using the company profile enrichment formula in conjunction with the ‘company_type’ attribute.
Sapiengraph classifies companies into the following 8 categories: Educational, Government Agency, Non-Profit, Partnership, Privately Held, Public Company, Self Employed, or Self Owned.
Credits: 1/company type
Formula: =SG_COMPANY(LINKEDIN_COMPANY_PROFILE_URL","company_type")
Final Thoughts
Firmographic data is only the first step in the nested funnel approach in B2B sales and marketing. Businesses cannot afford to ignore these key data points because they will affect customer acquisition and retention.
Try out Sapiengraph today and power up your prospects with firmographic data!
