Firmographic data describes organizations rather than individuals: industry, headcount, revenue, location, structure and age. It is the B2B equivalent of demographics and it is what makes a market segmentable. Every field carries a definition problem, so two providers can disagree about the same company without either being wrong.
What it is
The core fields are industry classification, employee count, revenue band, geography, number of locations, ownership type and years in operation. Together they answer whether a company belongs in your market before anyone looks at behavior. They are structural: they change slowly, they are observable from outside, and they can be compared across thousands of records, which is exactly what behavioral signals cannot do.
How it works
Sources differ in what they see. Registries carry legal entity data, which is authoritative for name and status and often stale for size. Professional networks carry self reported headcount, which drifts. Public listings carry category and location as the business chose to present them. Industry codes add their own trap: a company can be classified under a code that has little to do with what it sells day to day, so category based filters need a sample check before you trust them.
Why it matters for winning clients
Firmographics turn a vague market into a countable one. They let you size an opportunity, split a list into segments worth different messages, and rule out companies you cannot serve before you spend research time on them. They also make results comparable: without stable company attributes you cannot tell whether a campaign worked because of the message or because it happened to hit a better segment.
Example in LeadCanvas
An agency builds a segment from category, city and number of locations, then tests one criterion at a time. Our own July 2026 study of 231,349 deduplicated listings found the share of businesses without a website ranges from 0.7% for car dealerships in the United Kingdom to 61.4% for nurseries in Brazil, and inside Brazil from 11.4% in São Paulo to 75.0% in Parintins. Category alone is not a segment; category plus market is.
Common mistakes
Treating headcount as revenue, when the two diverge wildly across service and product businesses. Trusting an industry code without checking a sample of the companies it returned. Comparing size bands from two providers that define them differently. And building an entire targeting model on fields nobody re checks, which is how a segment slowly stops describing the companies inside it.
Related terms
The ideal customer profile is written in firmographic fields. Data enrichment is how those fields get filled. Total addressable market is what you can calculate once they are reliable. The links below open those entries and the market sizing tool.