Traditional firmographics, like employee count and company revenues, are staples of enterprise lead scoring programs. This makes sense as these are clear indicators of value. If a company has lots of revenue and lots of employees then they likely have budgets to purchase your product or service.
What about cases where you are attempting to prioritize large volumes of prospects or inbound leads, particularly in the long tail?
Traditional firmographic data doesn’t perform as well in these scenarios. There are several reasons why. This data is fairly limited for SMBs and can be highly inaccurate when it is available. It can also be quite expansive to source this type of information from a third party data provider.For long tail leads, I suggest using more modern indicators of value. So, what are these “modern firmographics”?
Below are some examples. In general, bigger is better for all of these signals. Keep in mind that values will vary greatly based on company vertical, business model and customer type.
- Website traffic: using Alexa, Quantcast or similar sources you can get a sense of the volume of visitors that a prospect’s website is receiving.
- Social popularity: popularity on social media, like followers on Twitter or likes on a Facebook page, is a great indicator of scale. You can get these stats directly from the social networks or use an API like Clearbit to get social following counts.
- Inbound links: the signal that launched Google is also great for evaluating leads. Websites with lots of inbound links are more likely to have a following and be considered authorities in their industry. Majestic publishes a free CSV download of the top domains by linking subnets which is a reasonable proxy for inbound links. Cisco also publishes a similar data set.
- Website shares: if people are sharing a potential prospect’s website on social media then you can get a sense of popularity. You can use a third party service like SharedCount to get counts of website shares across social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.