Data-informed decision making is more efficient and effective than traditional methods of lead generation — and few data types are more effective than firmographics.
Sales intelligence and firmographic data help revenue teams decipher whether a lead or opportunity is worth pursuing, and provide critical clues that help close more sales and improve deal conversion rates.
But what in the heck does firmographic data mean, anyway?
What are Firmographics?
Firmographics are the shared characteristics ascribed to organizations to help segment them into different groups.
Firmographics are to companies what demographics are to people. Much like how you might segment 18-to-29-year-olds from a certain population into one group, firmographic data enables you to:
- Divide companies that have, for example, over 2,000 employees and put them into one common group
- While moving companies that have 1 to 1,999 employees into another
Good sales intelligence products always factor in firmographics (among other segmentation tools) to chart out actionable market segments, based on how good a fit they are to a particular firm’s sales efforts.
Firmographics save revenue teams a ton of time, effort, and resources that might otherwise be wasted chasing baseless leads. They help you shift attention towards evidence-based, data-driven leads, too.
How Do I Use Firmographic Data to Gather Sales Intelligence?
Determining which firmographic variables are important to your marketing and sales efforts is vital for success. A simple yet efficient method of aggregating firmographic data is to remove variables that heavily influence the way a business firm operates into consideration.
Using this exact approach, one study found that the firmographic information of more than 11 million U.S. companies, when paired with its public records, served as an extremely accurate measure in predicting whether a company would go bankrupt in a year’s time.
Leveraging these five firmographic variables can help you triangulate your sales and engagement efforts:
- Industry
- Location
- Company size (number of employees or number of customers)
- Status and structure (relationships between subsidiaries or franchises, or company type such as a private corporation or LLC)
- Business performance (profit and loss statements, revenue fluctuations, customer satisfaction, financial statements, etc.)
Improving the Accuracy of Your Firmographic Data
Once you’ve aggregated these firmographic variables into actionable market segments, you’ve successfully condensed millions of prospective businesses into a few thousand ones. This kind of laser-like focus can send your conversions through the roof.
There are other types of prospective-customer firmographic data your organization can track and analyze, such as:
- Funding received
- Hiring status
- Keywords the company’s currently using to market its products
You can further filter your sales intelligence using data such as psychographics and technographics. This can greatly improve your targeting and help identify actionable market segments to fuel your business’s decision making.
It’s time-consuming and expensive to gather these firmographic data points through manual methods. Revenue teams can bleed out using pricey scraping tools, focus groups, customer interviews, surveys and other so-called solutions.
However, 6sense’s automated Sales Intelligence capabilities eliminate this heavy lifting, deliver the firmographic data (as well as technographics, psychographics, and more) and AI-powered analysis and orchestrations you need to focus your sales and marketing efforts on the accounts that actually matter and are ready to buy right now.
Contact us or schedule a demo to learn more.
