Why Your Business Needs Access to Reliable Firmographic Data

One of the biggest challenges in B2B sales is to identify the right prospects. Businesses pay large amounts of money to fill their sales funnel; however, most of these leads are unqualified. Even when they are qualified, if you can’t properly segment your audience on firmographic and technographic references, the effectiveness of your outreach will suffer.

Segmenting your audience makes it much easier to create relevant content that is used to convert prospects into leads and customers. As the old marketing saying goes, “if you target everyone, you target no one.”

In this article, we will walk you through what firmographic data is, what it includes, and how you can apply it to make your sales and marketing efforts more productive.

Let’s jump in.

What Is Firmographic Data?

B2B demographics, in the business world, are called firmographic info.

Firmographic information encompasses company-wide information and detailed user-level information. B2B segmentation with firmographics lets you paint a picture of who your customers are so that you can reach specific markets with appropriate content.

Firmographic data include details like:

1. Annual Revenue
2. Type of Industry
3. Number of Employees
4. Location(s)
5. Decision-Makers

Although firmographic data alone is not enough to create highly relevant content for your buyers, it is the place to start your segmentation process.

Where Does Firmographic Data Come From?

There are multiple resources available to collect the firmographic data.

1. LinkedIn
2. Business Directories and Listings
3. Data Intelligence Tools
4. Buying a List

That said, you must choose the most reliable data source. Business directories aren’t frequently updated. Same with buying a list as it involves risks of data errors. The fastest way to get updated data is by using a data intelligence tool.

Why Should You Care About Firmographics?

Personalization is critical in B2B as we enter 2023.

According to the Salesforce State of Marketing report, 65% of businesses will consider switching vendors if a brand doesn’t make any effort to personalize communication.

The latest Salesforce report states that 84% of consumers – and 83% of company customers – claim that being handled as a human being rather than a number from a list of phone numbers or email addresses is the secret to winning their business. Buyers demand a consumer-like experience from brands whose deeply customized content is essential to make this possible.

Understanding your existing customers’ needs and supportive firmographic data helps you answer your prospects’ questions, solve their challenges, and understand their expectations.

Benefits of Firmographic Segmentation

1. Potential clients can benefit from the knowledge.

Firmographic data can show how the company is funded and performing right now. Naturally, such knowledge is critical when selecting whether or not to invest. Furthermore, diverse firmographic data may help you better understand certain sectors and marketplaces because it exposes a lot about the organizations in the field.

2. Lead generation and scoring have been improved.

If you sell to companies, firmographic data will help you better segment the market and identify possible clients. This translates to more effective lead generation. It will also help you discern and rate leads, ensuring that your sales efforts are focused effectively.

3. Expanded sales intelligence.

When firmographic data is accessible, salespeople are better positioned to manage leads. Firms’ purchasing capacity and preferences may be assessed using the information on the company’s present standing, size, and other firmographics. Salespeople will be able to build stronger engagement plans and pitches as a result.

4. Personalized marketing and customer service.

Naturally, the more you know about a company, the better you can promote it. Furthermore, firmographic information aids in the provision of high-quality customer service, which is critical for acquiring and maintaining consumers. For example, understanding the firm’s geographical location allows you to be aware of opening hours and local events, aiding in easy communication.

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What Is Firmographic Information Used For?

Firmographic data is used for creating personalized content strategies.

For instance, a buyer working for a Fortune 500 company has different requirements than a startup trying to scale rapidly. If they have different demographics, they will have different challenges and, thus, different objectives to achieve. Why would they read the same blog posts and watch the same videos?

Firmographic data is crucial for both sales reps and marketers. Even within a company, firmographic data is essential for creating personalized content.

1. Quickly Identify Qualified Sales Leads

Once you start incorporating firmographic data into your sales workflow, segmenting and identifying qualified prospects becomes easy.

Suppose your solution is relevant to B2B SaaS companies with over $500K in annual revenue, and you just want to see companies based in Austin, Chicago, and NYC. With a few clicks, you can instantly use a tool like SalesIntel to filter and identify companies that fit your requirements.

This makes it easy for your team to focus on targeting your qualified prospects rather than throwing darts in the dark.

2. Improve Sales And Marketing Messaging

77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized experience.

Understanding your prospects’ revenue, the size of the company, locations, and other vital information will allow your team to send them relevant information about your offering and personalize their sales pitches and marketing communications.

When using firmographic data, you can speak to prospects and provide more value than ever.

3. Optimize Your Ad Targeting

Advertising based on assumptions is hard. If you make the wrong assumptions, you will waste money advertising to uninterested audiences. Instead, by collecting as much data as possible on your ideal prospects, you can then use that data to target your ads more effectively.

For example, if you run ads on LinkedIn, you can target audiences using several different types of firmographic data.

SalesIntel helps you identify companies that fit your firmographic requirements to be qualified as a lead. This way, you can have all the information to add to your LinkedIn audience while setting up your ad campaigns.

4. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

We all know that with the rise of account-based marketing, firmographic data is a necessity. How does it apply to ABM?

Marketers have been using firmographic data for a long time. However, for ABM, there are many use cases. ABM experts have long recognized the impact of bad data on ABM.

The whole idea behind ABM is to target specific and applicable accounts rather than selling and marketing to your entire total addressable marketing (TAM). When you identify who the right companies are, you can target these companies with super-personalized messaging.

The next step should be to collect verified contacts from those companies that suit your profile. Firmographic data, therefore, helps to initiate the process; that is, finding the right set of companies or accounts to target.

Additionally, Firmographic data can be used to create…

• Relevant email campaigns and newsletters
• Authoritative blog posts
• Tutorial and explainer videos about your company
• A/B testing

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.

Every time you create a specific piece of content, keep a specific firmographic segment in mind. It sounds easy and exciting but takes practice, trial and error, and constant improvement.

Access Only The Best Firmographic Data

The most significant challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and having accurate data (38%) (Source).

SalesIntel is a one-stop solution for all three challenges, as it gives you access to over 22 million accounts and 300+ million human-verified firmographic and technographic data points in one place at the click of a button. SalesIntel goes a step further and offers buyer Intent Data to help you identify ‘ready-to-buy’ prospects.

Many B2B data providers claim to offer accurate firmographic data. However, when it comes to accuracy and reliability, they may not have what you specifically need at a high level of accuracy.

The best example is one of the most popular companies in our industry that promotes itself for data accuracy, but the reality is far from the claims. For instance, a company like Toys ”R” Us, which declared bankruptcy in 2017 and ceased operations in 2018, still lists as employing 64,000 people in their database. If you’re paying for data, you want it to be data you’ll actually use.

For those trying to compare data providers, we have a handy head-to-head comparison.

SalesIntel’s data is re-verified by our human researchers every 90 days to ensure data accuracy. Additionally, if you need the data of your prospects or accounts that are not listed in our database, our team will provide you the accurate data with a quick turnaround (typically 24-48 hrs!) using our unique Research on Demand service.

When all is said and done, it is crucial for you, as a customer, to invest your budget and resources to access accurate data. After all, if your firmographic data is inaccurate then it’s impossible to reap its benefits.

Schedule a demo and get your queries resolved.