Glossary: targeting
What are firmographics in B2B sales?
Firmographics are the facts that describe a company, such as its industry, employee count, revenue and location. In B2B sales they do the job demographics do for consumers: they let you sort a market into groups and choose which to contact.
The four firmographics used most
Industry
What the company does
Employee count
How many people work there
Revenue
How much it sells in a year
Location
Where it is based
Firmographics come in four main kinds.
Industry, employee count, revenue and location each answer a different question about whether a company can buy, and each is a filter you can apply to a list.
Industry says whether the problem exists.
What the company does decides whether it has the problem at all. A product built for freight firms has little to say to a law office, so industry is the first cut of any list.
Size says whether they can buy.
How many people work there and how much it sells in a year show whether a company is big enough to need the product and small enough to decide quickly.
Location says whether you can serve them.
Where a company is based affects language, law, delivery and the hour your emails should arrive.
Here is a list filtered by firmographics for an invented company.
Imagine Quorndale, an invented company that sells maintenance software to factories. It starts with 12,000 manufacturing companies in a database. Keeping only those with 100 to 1,000 employees leaves 3,600.
Quorndale then keeps companies based in four Midwest states, which leaves 900, and removes its 60 existing customers. The finished account list is 840 companies. Every filter was a firmographic, and every one could be checked before a single contact was looked up.
Quorndale's list after each firmographic filter
Use firmographics to make the first cut of a list.
Firmographics are cheap to check and slow to change, which makes them the right place to start.
The four steps in order
- 1Pick the filters
- 2Set the bands
- 3Segment the list
- 4Compare replies
- 1
Choose two or three filters that matter.
Pick the filters from the traits your best customers share. More filters are not better: each one should remove companies that could not buy.
- 2
Set bands, not single numbers.
Write a range such as 100 to 1,000 employees. Company data is approximate, and a band forgives small errors.
- 3
Split the list into segments.
Segment the list by industry or size and write a message for each group. A line about their sector reads as research.
- 4
Compare replies by segment.
Read results by segment. The firmographic group that answers most deserves the next list.
Prymatica sources a custom prospect list for your exact ICP across most B2B industries and regions, and verifies every contact before sending. See how Prymatica's cold email process works.
Teams make these mistakes with firmographics.
Firmographics are the only filter.
Two companies of the same size and sector can have opposite needs. Add a trigger or a signal before you call a company a fit.
The data is out of date.
Headcount and revenue change. A list built on last year's numbers includes companies that have shrunk, merged or closed.
The bands are too narrow.
A filter that leaves a few dozen companies cannot support a campaign or a test. Widen the band until the list is large enough to learn from.
These glossary terms sit next to firmographics.
Questions
People ask these questions about firmographics.
What are examples of firmographic data?
Industry, employee count, yearly revenue, location, ownership type such as private or public, and the year the company was founded. Each is a fact about the company, not about a person in it.
What is the difference between firmographics and demographics?
Demographics describe people: age, income, location. Firmographics describe organizations: industry, size, revenue, location. B2B targeting uses firmographics to choose companies, then job title and seniority to choose people.
What is the difference between firmographics and technographics?
Firmographics describe what a company is. Technographics describe the software and hardware it uses. Technographics help when your product replaces or connects to a specific tool.
How are firmographics used in cold email?
They decide which companies go on the list, and they give the copy something specific to say. An email that names the reader's industry and size band reads as written for them.
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