What is Company Data? Examples, Providers & Datasets to Buy

Company data can be employed by your business in more ways than one. As mentioned in the previous section, there are a lot of departments of your business that are going to benefit from the company data. Therefore, it should be used to its full potential to make the best out of your marketing and sales campaigns.

Here are the few ways in which you can use company data:

Account Based Marketing

Company data can come in very handy in all stages of ABM, from identifying a new account, to nurturing it, to closing the deal.

Identifying New Accounts

Analyzing company data to evaluate your key clients can inform you about the key things you should be offering when looking to acquire a new account. For example, you can find when the right time to reach out might be by using intent data, and find a good point of contact via contact data. This can help you properly nurture the new account and prepare it to close the deal with the sales team.

Lead Scoring and Prioritization

There are countless companies that will qualify as a potential prospect, but they’re not always all a priority. Company data not only allows you to identify these companies, but it also helps you to filter them in terms of when is the best opportunity to seal the deal.

For example, firmographic data can show the expected length of a company’s sales cycle and this can help to better prepare your sales team.

In other cases, many businesses prefer their clients to be in close proximity to them. A company database can help you to filter the companies by their locations. You might just find the perfect fit right around the corner!

Personalizing Communication

After you’ve found a client account that is interested, nurtured them and identified when they are interested, the final step is then ensuring you engage with them in terms that they relate to. Company data can help your sales teams to speak in the right way and deliver the right message to the account of interest, which is especially vital when securing the final part of the deal-making process.

Company Data Analysis

Analysis is, arguably, the one of the most key uses of collected company data. The data alone means very little. It is only with analysis that the data holds value to you and your business.

Descriptive Analysis

Descriptive analysis provides you with an overview of what the company of interest is and how they perform. This shows you the current and past situation of the company, and is primarily based on firmographic, technographic and intent data. Descriptive analysis includes the process of looking at past data to identify trends.

Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis will help you in preparing for future trends by analyzing the growth rate of a company and its revenue charts. These can be helpful in adjusting your marketing strategies likewise.

Prescriptive analysis

Prescriptive analysis takes the aforementioned predictions and suggests actions. In other words, it is about handling the various situations anticipated by predictive analysis. For example, if predictive analysis talks about opportunities for your business to sell a product in a new market, the prescriptive analysis will talk about how your salesperson can pitch it.

The key attributes of company data can be divided into firmographic and technographic-based data. Depending on what type of information about a company you require, you will rely more on one or the other of these two. With the use of these two types of data you can build an extensive company contact database of those companies most suited to fulfilling your company’s needs.

In general, company data will have the following attributes:

Firmographic Attributes

Firmographic data is data specific to an organisation. Just as demographic data focuses on individuals, firmographic data focuses on the organisation. B2B businesses can use firmographic data to help with market segmentation by using variables to categorise firms. Firmographic data can tell us which industry an organisation fits in to or its location, for example.

Company Name and Address

The most basic data on a company you could have! It goes without saying that you need to know the name of the company you’re engaging with. Along with that, it’s helpful to have the address of the head office of the company, as well as the addresses of their branches in any countries you’re interested in. By having access to a company’s address or addresses, you can make informed assumptions about their behaviours, whether they be influenced by the geography, climate or regulations of the area.

Industry

When using firmographic segmentation to categorise firms, firms can be attributed an industry label. This indicates the firm’s primary activities, whether that be the type of services they offer or the products that they produce. When trying to target a particular firm it is crucial that you take into account which industry they operate in. For example, a company that operates in the environmental sector is unlikely to be seeking the same resources as a company that operates in the high-street fashion industry. Not only is it important to take industry labels into account to ensure the appropriate resources are delivered to those firms, but also to help you to sift out those firms that are not involved in the particular industry you are looking to work with. For this reason, it’s a good idea to include industry in your B2B ICP before you make a data purchase. There’s no point investing in an IT company database if you’re targeting retailers!

Company Size and Revenue

Company size is typically divided into two attributes: annual revenue and number of employees.

A company’s revenue is a key consideration in firmographic segmentation. It is little use targeting a company that doesn’t have the funds to afford what you’re offering. For this reason, it’s good to build a customer ICP so you know what kind of company you’re looking to prospect with data-driven outreach. If it’s large companies and enterprises, you’ll need to buy corporate data. If your ICP is a start-up or SME, you can buy start-up company data.

Taking into consideration factors such as whether a company has experienced considerable fluctuations is their revenue over the years or where they fall in terms of being a small start-up or whether they’re listed on the FTSE 100 helps you adapt your B2B marketing strategies. A company revenue database gives you a comprehensive source of truth for revenue and how it’s fluctuating, which is why revenue data is such an important company data attribute.

Having data indicating the number of employees a company has is one of the most helpful pieces of firmographic data you can have. The number of employees indicates whether they’re a small start-up, medium sized company, or even a large multinational company. Ultimately, these numbers will greatly influence how you go about targeting these companies. The way you would approach a small, local business is completely different to how you would a large business with bases in multiple countries.

Employee Information

You can also expect the company database to delve into employee information in detail. This data generally consists of the names of the employees, along with their role in the company. It should also include the department of the employee and their seniority. Being aware of individual employees and their roles helps you to gain an impression of who best to contact and target within the company.

Products

One type of firmographic data that is often provided when purchasing company data is information on the various products and services offered by the company, both those currently being offered and past ventures of the company. This can help with finding potential cooperation and for performing product analysis. If you can detect an overlap of your products or services with another company or observe that they are offering something your company is lacking this can provide great potential for collaboration.

Funding Information

It is also possible to discover information on a company’s current level and sources of funding, as well as to get an idea of their potential budgets. Funding information can give you a clearer idea about the growth of the company and when and how it might spend its finances. If a company is heavily reliant on one source of funding you might wish to take this into account before targeting that company. A company reliant on one source of funding, particularly a source that might be vulnerable to fluctuations or losses, may not have a very stable or secure future, making it a company that may prove to present future financial difficulties.

Legal Status

Another attribute that can be used in firmographic segmentation is a company’s legal status. For example, a company could be operating as a Public Limited Company (PLC), a privately held company, a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) or a partnership, just to name a few. Being aware of the legal status of a company is of importance, whether you’re looking to invest in the company or target your marketing towards them.

Technographic Attributes

Technology Stack

Having access to data on a company’s current technology stack allows you to build up a profile of that company and how they operate. You should also expect to be presented with when these technologies were acquired, helping to form a timeline for this profile. When it comes to technographic segmentation, there is often an element of assumption: a company may rely on a certain software, leading you to draw conclusions about the company’s operational methods. These conclusions, however, are more often that not, very accurate if you have an understanding of either the technologies used or an understanding of how companies of that size or in that industry generally operate.

Online Presence and Social Profiles

Almost every company nowadays dedicates time to maintaining its public presence through blogs and various social media profiles. Company data effortlessly collects and summarises information from these platforms for you. As well as this, it can offer an insight into how a company behaves online, including specific social media posts, job postings, and online searches.

This information can add context into how the company functions and wishes to present itself. Collecting information from social media profiles or blogs is reasonably easy to do and, as companies turn to these platforms more and more, they present an increasingly relevant source of information about a company and its behaviours.

Intent Data Attributes

Buying Signals

In-depth company data may include information on the company’s more recent acquisitions and services the company has recently stopped using. It could also even contain information on what the company has been searching for online or on comparison sites.

Below, we outline the most popular attributes associated with this type of data—features that data buyers are actively seeking to meet their needs.