Beyond phone numbers and firmographics

Old school enrichment is leaving a gap.

Lately I’ve talked to several RevOps leaders about their trickiest data gaps.

This isn’t about rep outreach. This is about understanding a market to determine TAM, ICP, segmentation and territory design—big strategic choices that massively influence next year’s financial plan.

And there are SO MANY gaps.

The gaps aren’t simple. The basics like phone numbers and simple firmographics are covered. It’s really about where data bleeds into information.

Here are some types of gaps I’m seeing:

• Industry-specific technographics. I’ve been talking with a customer in healthcare. Healthcare tech stacks are complex and fragmented. There are specialized data providers but they’re struggling to keep up.

• Domain-specific taxonomies. One customer targets professional services providers for SMBs. Understanding the types of backoffice services those companies offer and which they prioritize is just as important as company size. There’s no good source for data like this and any scraped data needs to be heavily processed to fit into a meaningful taxonomy.

• “Hard” firmographics. One customer recently did a market-sizing exercise that relied on the physical locations of each prospect. Another customer needs to understand the total number of front-line employees. Some providers claim to have this data, but it’s spotty at best. I think of these as “hard” firmographics. The hard numbers do exist, but they’re very hard to source.

• “Soft” firmographics. I talked with a company in the food service space. The concept of a “well-established” restaurant is important to them. Another customer cares a lot about finding companies with “road warrior” employees. These criteria are tricky to precisely define but, much like the famous supreme court ruling on obscenity, you usually know it when you see it.

• Classifications. This really isn’t about data, more like synthesis. Most companies need to put prospects into buckets—anything from use cases to personas to a set of defined market segments. Having to rely on reps to do this assessment means we can’t use these classifications to make strategic resource allocations.

So we’re back in planning season. Yet again trying to compile data points from bulk enrichment providers, combine that with spotty data captured by reps, sprinkle in some self-reported customer data from apps and lead forms and then somehow—somehow—turn this shaky foundation into the hard commitment of a financial plan.

It’s a difficult, high-risk job and RevOps is usually at the very center. I know because I’ve been there.

I wish I could end with pithy advice about how to fill these kinds of gaps, but I’m afraid it’s not that easy. I’d love to hear from anyone that’s got a complicated strategic data gap. We might be able to help. But if nothing else, I’d love to talk shop, share what I’ve seen and learn how you’re tackling the problem.