The ROI for marketing automation software demands that the underlying databases being used have robust firmographic data so company records can be searched by size. These size-indicating datapoints have typically either been annual revenues or the total number of employees and in both cases it helps accurate targeting to have additional metadata for context (i.e., the time period and currency for the annual revenue figures and an FTE calculation methodology for the employee headcount numbers).
The metadata is not really needed for most broad searches (e.g., all manufacturers in California with $10MM- $30MM in revenues) ,but some sort of size indicator (even if it’s an estimate) are required for most routine searches. This is generally not too difficult to obtain but there are several industries where other types of size indicators are more meaningful and more commonly used.
For instance:
- Agriculture: Acres under cultivation
- Financial Advisories: Assets under management
- Hospital systems: Number of patient beds
- Ranching: Livestock headcounts
Appending these industry-specific metrics has other advantages:
- It establishes a barrier to entry to competitors trying to be all things to all people (giving the advantage to the provider with the more granular and accurate size indicator).
- It can be used as a “checksum” to validate other size estimates.
- It’s more valuable to firms marketing specific products (ag chemical producers, financial software providers, etc.).
For all of these reasons, spending the time, money, and effort to append unique firmographics can be well worth the investment in Internet research, automated data extraction, and/or telephone research to obtain the data.
