Firmographics

How firmographics work

Firmographics do for companies what demographics do for consumers. Wikipedia puts it as what demographics are to people, firmographics are to organizations 2. Instead of age or income, you describe a company by its industry, its size and where it operates.

A firmographic segment is a filter built from those fields. A B2B filter might select software companies in Germany with 50 to 249 staff, which is the EU's medium-sized band 3. Each field narrows the market, and the result is a list of accounts that share traits with your best customers. Location needs the same care as size. A record usually gives the headquarters, while the company may sell and hire in many countries. When a segment depends on language, time zone or privacy law, the countries where the company operates matter more than the address of its head office.

Size is the field with the most definitions. Teams measure it by employee count, by revenue or by both. The EU sets its company size classes by staff headcount together with turnover or balance sheet total 3. A data source may return size as a band rather than an exact number. The RichAPI Company enrichment reference types companySize as a string and advises treating it as a band label until you inspect a live response 4.

Firmographics sit at the outer layer of segmentation. Shapiro and Bonoma proposed five segmentation criteria in a nested hierarchy, with firmographics such as industry, company size and customer location at the macro level 2. The inner layers need other data. Technographics describe the tools a company runs, and buying signals describe what it is doing now. Firmographics feed an ideal customer profile, and they are one output of data enrichment.

Types of firmographic data

In this glossary we group firmographic fields into five types.

• Industry, the sector a company works in, often coded with a standard industry classification.
• Size, measured as employee count, revenue or both.
• Location, meaning the headquarters and the countries where the company operates.
• Age, usually given as the founding year.
• Structure, such as legal form, ownership, or whether the company is part of a group.

Each type answers a different question. Industry tells you whether the product applies. Size tells you whether the account fits your pricing and sales motion. Location tells you about language, time zone and which privacy law applies. Structure tells you who buys. The EU SME definition shows why structure matters, because a firm that is part of a larger group may need to count the group's staff and figures too 3.

Some lists add funding stage or growth rate. Those values change faster than the core five, so they behave more like signals than like fixed traits. Funding data has its own page in this glossary.

Example of firmographics

The EU's SME definition is a firmographic segmentation written into policy 3. It sorts enterprises by staff headcount and by either turnover or balance sheet total. Medium-sized enterprises have fewer than 250 staff, small ones fewer than 50 and micro ones fewer than 10, each with a financial ceiling as well 3. The same page adds a group rule. A firm that is part of a larger group may need to include staff headcount and financial data from that group 3.

The group rule applies to sales data too. A small subsidiary can look like a small company on its own record while its parent is a large enterprise that buys centrally. Segmenting on the subsidiary's headcount alone puts the account in the wrong band and may route it to the wrong team.

To read the fields for one account, a team can call RichAPI Company enrichment with a LinkedIn company page URL. The documented response includes industry, companySize, headquarters and founded, and founded is an integer 4. The reference also states the input limit. The endpoint does not accept a domain or a company name, so a team that starts from a website needs the company's LinkedIn URL first 4. Store the size band as returned, and keep the retrieval date next to it. Before placing an account in a band, check whether it belongs to a group and which entity signs contracts, because that entity sets the real size of the deal.

Firmographics vs technographics

The two are often paired, and they answer different questions. Firmographics describe the company itself. Technographics describe the software and tools the company uses. Firmographic fields come from what a company is and states about itself, such as its sector, headcount and address. Technographic fields are detected, often from traces a company's tools leave on its website. Most target account lists use both, because each misses what the other sees. A filter on firmographics alone cannot tell a prospect that runs your integration partner's software from one that does not. A filter on technographics alone cannot tell a five-person agency from a large enterprise that runs the same tool.