Firmographic Data: What It Actually Includes
By Kooperativa Engineering
"Firmographic data" gets used loosely enough in vendor marketing that it is worth being precise about what the term actually covers before evaluating any provider on it. It is the company-level equivalent of demographic data for a person: attributes that describe a business as an organization, industry, size, age, location, structure, not attributes that describe what it does with software or who to call there.
That distinction matters because the three categories that get bundled under one "company data" pitch, firmographic, technographic (what software a company runs), and intent (who is actively researching a purchase), come from fundamentally different sources and behave differently in terms of freshness and confidence. Treating them as one thing makes it hard to evaluate any of them properly.
The fields that are actually firmographic
Here is a real company record, trimmed to the fields that fall under the term:
{
"company_id": "23676",
"name": "MAK Technologies",
"company_type": "Privately Held",
"founded_year": 1990,
"staff_count": 259,
"industries": ["Software Development"],
"specialities": ["Simulation", "Training Systems"],
"hq_city": "Cambridge",
"hq_country_code": "US",
"hq_geographic_area": "MA"
}Industry, headcount, founding year, legal structure, headquarters location, that is the full list. Nothing in that set requires knowing anything about a specific person at the company, which is exactly what makes firmographic data the cheapest and most stable category to source: it changes slowly, and it does not require the kind of continuous re-crawling that a job title or a hiring signal does.
What firmographic data is not
Two adjacent categories get folded in often enough that it is worth naming them explicitly so a features comparison does not quietly compare the wrong things.
- Technographic data, what tools and platforms a company runs (CRM, cloud provider, analytics stack), is sourced from website scanning and job posting analysis, not from a firmographic profile. Kooperativa does not carry this today.
- Intent data, signals that a company is actively researching a category of purchase, is sourced from ad networks, content consumption tracking, or committee-level research activity. It is inherently time-decaying in a way firmographic data is not, a headcount figure is still roughly right in three months, an intent signal usually is not.
The one caveat worth repeating
staff_count and any headcount-derived figure reflects profiles indexed in a dataset, not an audited employee count filed anywhere official. For a well-documented company the two track closely. For a smaller or less digitally visible one, the gap can be meaningful, which matters if a scoring model treats the indexed number as exact rather than directional.
Using it for account scoring
Firmographic fields are usually the first filter in an account scoring model, before any signal or intent layer gets applied, since they narrow a universe of companies down to the ones structurally capable of being a fit at all.
function isFirmographicFit(company) {
const inTargetIndustry = company.industries.includes('Software Development');
const inSizeBand = company.staff_count >= 50 && company.staff_count <= 500;
const isEstablished = new Date().getFullYear() - company.founded_year >= 3;
return inTargetIndustry && inSizeBand && isEstablished;
}Get started
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