Firmographics

Firmographics are to companies what demographics are to people. They are the first filter in most account lists: an industry, a headcount range, a set of countries. They are easy to buy and filter on, which is also their weakness: every competitor can build the same list.

Firmographics say whether a company could buy, not whether it will buy now. A logistics firm of the right size is a fit on paper; the same firm that just hired a new head of operations and opened a second warehouse has a reason to talk this quarter. That is why firmographics are usually combined with technographics, buying signals and research on the company's own pages before anyone writes an email.

Data on headcount and revenue goes stale as companies grow, shrink and merge, so the date a figure was read matters as much as the figure itself.