Company data is information surrounding a company’s qualities and behaviors, such as internal customer relations, firmographic, technographic, and intent data. It tells a story about the company – its people, struggles, and victories – through hundreds of data points collected from public sources. Such information is usually gathered from third-party data companies.
What data makes up company data?
Company data is a broad term for big data that covers internal customer relations data and external data, data collected by third-party data companies, about a business’s characteristics and behavior.
Customer relations or customer relationship management (CRM data) collects, stores, and analyzes the information that a company gathers about its clients. It's an example of internal data (data collected by the company), whereas external data is gathered by third parties about the company from public sources. In this article, we will focus on the external company data and its benefits.
More specifically, Coresignal's company data can be divided into seven main subcategories:
- Firmographic data – data that characterizes the organization, such as company size, location, or industry.
- Employee data – information about the key decision-makers in the company.
- Job postings data – listings of open positions at the company.
- Company employee review data – summary of employee feedback about their experience.
- Company funding data – data about the company’s financials and investments.
- Tech product review data – assessments of the product the company offers.
- Technographic data – data about technologies, tools, and programming languages used by the company.
Now, let’s explore those subcategories in more detail.
What is firmographic data?
Firmographic data is defined as data that is specific to a particular organization’s structure, qualities, and other unique identifiers. Specifically, if demographics focus on the general characteristics of individuals, firmographic data focuses on the general characteristics of businesses. As a result, high-quality firmographic data can provide data scientists, marketing and sales teams, and investors with in-depth business insights, such as:
- Company name
- Industry
- Subsidiary status
- Size
- Revenue
- Employee information
- Location
What is employee data?
Employee data is gathered from leading platforms connected to business. This data is useful in boosting recruitment processes and lead generation. Moreover, you can enrich your data and track talent movement. The most valuable data points from this dataset are location, education, and overall experience. Accessing this data greatly improves your chances of success in the aforementioned aspects of your business.
Main employee data fields:
- Name
- Location
- Connections
- Position
- Institution
- Skill
What is job postings data?
Job postings data gives insight into the growth and expansion of a selected company. You can keep track of the hiring process to observe a firm's ambitions and the direction they want to pursue. Having such knowledge, you can make data-driven business decisions and decide whether it would be beneficial for you to get involved with certain companies.
Main jobs data fields:
- Title
- Location
- Employment type
- Number of open positions within a company
- Description of the position
What is company employee reviews data?
Company employee reviews data shows the overall satisfaction of employed people in a company. You can make educated guesses about whether the company will succeed long-term or struggle due to poor employee care. A positive workplace atmosphere is becoming increasingly important; therefore, keeping track of a company's internal environment is crucial to making successful business decisions.
Main company employee reviews data fields:
- Review summary
- Author's title
- Pros of the company
- Cons of the company
- Overall rating of the company
What is company funding data?
Company funding data provides valuable insights into what companies have recently been funded and by whom. You can generate new business opportunities by finding companies with positive operational efficiency and receiving investments from trustworthy funds. You can also improve your understanding of a certain market landscape and identify companies with the most potential.
Main company funding data fields:
- The last funding date
- Acquiring company's name
- Cost of the acquisition
- Investing company's name
- Year of the investment
- Name of the funded company
What is tech product review data?
Tech product review data helps determine what the market leaders and customers think about particular products or software a business creates. Understanding the market's satisfaction with a product provides invaluable intelligence towards investment decisions. You can filter out irrelevant products that show no signs of public interest and focus on the potentially groundbreaking solutions worth investing your attention in.
Main tech product review data fields:
- Product name
- Product categories
- Related products
- The rating score of the product
- Industry
- The number of reviewees
What is technographic data?
Technographic data gives you a glimpse into the company's technology stack. Gaining this insight helps to understand how technologically advanced a company is and what kind of tools, services, and programming languages it uses. Technographic data provides a deeper look into how a particular company operates, how advanced its tech stack is, and what tools it might lack to reach its full potential.
Altogether, this type of data is a goldmine for sales intelligence. Once you know what kind of tools the company uses, you can make educated guesses about services or products it might need soon.
The main technographic data fields:
- Number of stack lists for a particular firm
- Promoted features
- Amount of companies using the technology
- Advantages of the technology
- Amount of stacks this technology appears in
The benefits of company data
Lead generation
Companies can use sales intelligence tools to utilize historical company data such as company documents, social media, and general information. With high-quality company data, sales intelligence tools can significantly increase a company's lead generation. Some additional areas where businesses can utilize company data include:
- Training AI and machine learning-based tools
- Qualifying leads for account-based marketing
- Making investment decisions
For instance, big data companies provide developers with high-quality data so they can build AI-based machine learning lead generation tools. Combined with jobs and employee data, firmographic data can provide businesses with a complete picture of their prospective clients. Let's delve into the details of how those three datasets can improve your lead generation.
Firmographic data
First of all, you can group companies into categories that fit your sales and marketing teams the best. You can filter the companies by size, revenue, industry, type, and location. By implementing such an approach, you lose a large number of irrelevant companies and can stay focused on the ones that fit your ICP the best.
Secondly, now that you have filtered out the noise, you can focus on the music. However, remember that everyone has a different taste. Therefore, personalizing is important if you want to grab the attention of your target audience and show that you've done your homework.
Finally, once you have the specifics of a qualified sales lead, you can start personalizing your delivery pitch. Since you're using firmographics and you know the company's characteristics, you can tailor the message specifically for the company to show that you know exactly how your offer can make their day easier.
"Company data provides immense value for sales teams looking to find the right organizations and the right leaders that would fit their product or service. While they're a great starting point, they never have enough information to get a feel for the company structure or the state of operations."
- Blake Burch, Co-founder of Shipyard
Employee data
Employee data allows you to see professional information about a person. Data points such as experience, education, and connections help you filter out the right candidates for you and your business. Using this information, you can establish a qualified list of potential customers and contacts to enhance your lead generation. Combining firmographic data with employee data allows an even deeper insight into talent movement between companies, uncover certain trends, and indicate the growth of an industry.
Jobs data
Jobs data provides insight into a company's growth and expansion. For lead generation purposes, it is possible to approach a newly hired employee that could benefit from your product. By analyzing the job description, you can find useful information about certain pain points and offer your company's products to alleviate them. Combining all three datasets allows you to make informed and data-driven decisions that will attract more success than good old guesswork.
Enhanced market research insights
Companies leverage firmographic data to discover market trends, monitor growth rates, and track industry trends. As a result, big data companies help businesses and investors make better business decisions and generate business opportunities. Further, monitoring their competitors' revenue, locations, and size can help companies visualize market gaps and growth opportunities.
Generated competitive intelligence insights
Additionally, firmographics such as market performance, status, and the structure of a given company can provide businesses with insights on their competitors’ movement, growth, funding, and more. For example, monitoring your competitors’ growth rate by tracking the growth of specific teams or new office locations can help you make better-informed business decisions.
What is intent data?
Intent data, also known as B2B intent data, is defined as data that describes recent company's operations. In other words, intent data indicates buying signals and consequently provides businesses with information on when is the best time to approach prospective clients.
This data can include descriptors such as recent acquisitions, renewed or discontinued services, search information, and more. While this data appears wide-ranging and somewhat undefined, intent data has the power to enhance lead generation, predictive analytics, inform competitive analysis, and improve sales. So let’s take a closer look at the benefits of intent data.
Benefits of intent data
- Shows signs of market growth
Companies can leverage intent data such as recent acquisitions, services, and comparison website data to track market growth and monitor their competitors.
- Help predict buying signals
Predicting buying signals is the most common use of intent data. As a result, companies are able to build artificial intelligence-based machine learning models that can provide information surrounding the likelihood of buying.
What is internal CRM data?
Internal CRM data is customer relation data collected internally by a particular company. More specifically, CRM data refers to data stored within a company’s customer relationship management system that is used to further describe the qualities and characteristics of a company’s structure as it relates to its current customers. First, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of CRM data.
Benefits of internal CRM data
- Improves lead generation
Companies are able to improve their lead generation by collecting internal data for their CRM through lead capture tools, manual collection, social media activity, and jobs, to name a few.
- Provides competitive intelligence insights
Companies can gain competitive intelligence insights by analyzing data from an internal CRM. Most companies are able to discover trends, sentiment, and shortcomings by analyzing CRM data and its sources.
How is company data collected?
Web scraping
According to Outside Insight, of the companies that use public web data, 50% of the data they use is collected via web scraping. Scraped data includes relevant data that is collected from a particular source. Best company data sources include public web data collected from social media, websites, documents, etc.
Online collection (Inbound traffic)
Online company data collection includes data that was accrued specifically through inbound and organic traffic. This can include traffic from people interested in webinar registrations, mailing list subscriptions, sales consultations, social media interactions, jobs, etc. Most businesses collect this data through tools such as Google Analytics.
Manual collection
While manual collection is sometimes tedious, it can lead to powerful insights and business opportunities. The manual collection process involves activities such as event registrations, cold calls, lead capture tools, giveaways, surveys, etc. However, it's important to be aware of private company data, since that could bring more trouble than value.
How is company data used?
Company data is used by various professionals ranging from data scientists and developers to investors and sales teams. Because of the broad scope of company data, it is common for many departments within an organization to utilize company data. For example, you can utilize company data for more efficient sales prospecting.
For example, some companies hire data analysts to crunch raw data to discover insights which are then passed on to other departments such as marketing and sales. On the other hand, some private companies purchase ready-made insights from big data providers that are used across multiple departments.
Analysis
Upon analysis of company data, companies can leverage two types of analysis processes for enhanced decision-making. These analysis types are descriptive and predictive analysis:
Descriptive analysis involves interpreting big data to evaluate how a particular company performs.
Predictive analysis involves discovering trends, growth, revenue, etc. from data about a particular company. Some specific processes enhanced by company data include:
- Market analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Prescriptive analysis
- Investing
- Business intelligence
In addition to enhanced lead generation and analysis, companies can leverage external company data to improve their business intelligence. Understanding how your competitors are operating, performing, and forecasting can provide analytical insights on ways your company can improve, expand, and perform successful risk management. Some specific areas companies can improve by leveraging company data include efficiency, workflow, and tools.
Three things to look out for
1. Utilizing the full potential of company data
Sometimes companies don’t leverage the full potential of public web data sources. For example, only utilizing partial amounts of big data or not cleaning the data enough to be used successfully in AI-based machine learning tools. This can negatively impact data-driven decision-making.
2. Managing data freshness and quality
Without up-to-date intelligence and accurate other company data, businesses might be misled by insights gathered from data companies with insufficient data. For example, regularly updated data such as revenue, partners, and company size will enhance all further analyses and integrations of said data.
3. Implementing company-wide data consistency
Companies must consistently utilize big data throughout their tools, processes, and storage. If company data is not consistently managed and organized between a sales team and a marketing team, for instance, the two teams might not be able to communicate accurately, resulting in inefficient marketing strategies and at least one unhappy sales professional.
Top sources of company data
At Coresignal, we offer firmographic data from multiple sources. Let’s take a look at some of the top sources.
Most reliable company data providers
- Coresignal. Coresignal provides a stable stream of fresh web data on companies and their talent for data-driven businesses. In total, Coresignal offers millions company data records from multiple firmographic data sources.
- People Data Labs. People Data Labs provides accurate and fresh B2B data for data-driven businesses at scale and offers over 28 million company data records.
- Mixrank. Mixrank provides ultra-high-frequency technographic and people data for data teams and offers over 45 million company data records.
Effective Company Research with a company database
Effective company research requires comprehensive, reliable, and fresh data. One of the ways to get such data is to buy a dataset or a database API plan from a web data provider that collects data on companies at scale.
Having access to an extensive database of fresh data on companies is an excellent way to find organizations you’re interested in based on specific filters. You can get the most important information about these companies, monitor changes, and extract other types of actionable insights that can be used to inform investment decisions or generate more leads.
When choosing a company database, it’s also important to make sure that the data you’re getting isn’t stale. If you’re using web data from sources like the professional network to research companies, you know that things change fast. In order to notice signals of changes like hiring sprees, changes in the leadership, company growth or challenges it's facing as early as possible, make sure that you’re using fresh data whether you’re buying it from a data provider or collecting it yourself.
Wrapping up
Businesses and investors leverage company data for strategic market insights, lead generation, competitive intelligence, and investment intelligence. As the digital landscape of business and finance expands, companies will need to utilize public web data companies to stay ahead of the competition and find business success. If you want company data to help your business, contact our sales team at [email protected] or schedule a consultation below.
