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Firmographics and competitive intelligence: layering company data properly
Company intelligence is not one dataset, it is a stack. Each layer answers a different question and costs a different amount, and the common mistake is buying the deepest layer for every record when most records only need the cheapest. This guide sets out the layers in order — identity, firmographics, competitive position, investor and footprint — and what each is actually for.
Layer 1 — identity: does this company exist, and what is its domain?
Before anything else you need to resolve a name to a real entity with a verified domain. This is the step most pipelines skip and then pay for later, because every subsequent join depends on it. Name-based matching across sources fails often enough that a verified domain is worth more than three enriched fields built on a wrong match.
Keep this layer cheap and run it over everything. It is a filter, not a research product.
Layer 2 — firmographics: the segmentation fields
Industry, size band, revenue band, headquarters, founding year, ownership status. These are the fields you filter on to define a market. Run them broadly, over your whole list, at low cost per record — that is exactly what this layer is for, and our enrichment dataset is deliberately priced for running at volume rather than for depth on individual records.
Be honest with yourself about what firmographics can and cannot do. They describe who a company is. They say nothing about what it is currently doing, which is why a firmographic-only list converts poorly: every competitor is working from the same segmentation, at the same moment, with no timing signal at all.
Company firmographic enrichment →
Layer 3 — competitive position: the outside view
This is where the depth lives, and where you should spend on the accounts that matter rather than on all of them. A competitive intelligence profile adds what firmographics cannot:
- A named competitor set — the companies the market groups this one with. That is an outside view, and it is regularly not the list the company would write for itself. For positioning and displacement selling, the outside view is the useful one.
- Revenue and headcount estimates for private companies, as bands.
- Ticker and public-market identity where the company is listed. In our measurements the ticker field populated on every public company we checked and was correctly empty for private ones — which is the right behaviour, and worth understanding before you read a fill-rate table and conclude the field is broken.
- Direct contact routes — a phone number was present on roughly four out of five profiles in our sample.
The structural point: run layer 2 over ten thousand companies, run layer 3 over the two hundred that survived the filter. That is the economically correct shape, and it is why we price the two layers differently.
Competitor sets & company profiles → · Company operational profiles →
Layer 4 — the specialist layers
Tech employer profiles
For technology companies, employer profiles add the stack, office locations, benefits and culture positioning — the things a candidate-facing profile publishes that a firmographic database never carries. If you sell developer tools or recruit engineers, the stack field alone justifies the layer.
Investor portfolios
A funding event is among the best-timed signals in B2B, because newly funded companies have budget, growth pressure and a mandate to spend it. Watching an investor's portfolio gives you a self-refreshing list of exactly those companies — and, read across funds, it shows you where capital is moving before the sector has a name.
Investor portfolio watchlist →
Location footprint
One headquarters address hides the shape of a business. Footprint data — how many sites, where, of what type — answers the territory questions: regional or national, present in your market or not, and how to size an opportunity that scales per site rather than per company.
What each layer costs you, and what it buys
| Layer | Run it over | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Everything | Is this real, and what is the domain? |
| Firmographics | Everything that passed | Is this in my market? |
| Competitive profile | Qualified accounts only | Who do they compete with, how big are they really? |
| Specialist layers | Target accounts | Stack, investors, physical footprint |
| Timing signals | Continuously | Hiring, regulatory events, contract awards |
The honest limits
- Private-company revenue is an estimate. Treat it as a band. Where a company files public accounts — most of Europe, see the Nordic and Eastern European registries — the filing beats any model.
- Competitor sets are perception, not market share. That is their value and their limit.
- An empty field is not always a missing field. A ticker is absent for private companies because there is no ticker. Read fill rates against the population they apply to, not against the whole file.
- Firmographics alone do not convert. They define the market; something with a date on it tells you when to act. Pair every firmographic list with at least one timing signal.
Frequently asked questions
What are firmographics?
Industry, size, revenue band, location, founding year — the segmentation layer. They describe who a company is, not what it is doing now.
How are competitor sets built?
From category classification, co-consideration and community input — an outside view of who the market groups a company with.
Should I trust revenue estimates?
As bands, for segmentation. Not as figures. Public filings beat estimates wherever they exist.
Why track investors?
Funded companies buy. A portfolio watchlist is a self-refreshing list of companies with budget and growth pressure.