Firmographic data describes the company: industry, headcount, location, revenue band. Technographic data describes the technology that company runs: cloud provider, CRM, payment processor. Demographic data, in a B2B context, describes the people: job title, seniority, function. Three different questions. Collect them in that order and your routing works. Collect them out of order and you end up with a very detailed picture of an account you should never have qualified.
| What it answers | Example fields | When it matters | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firmographic | Is this account worth our time? | Industry, employee count, HQ location, revenue band | At signup, before routing |
| Technographic | Do we fit their stack, and is now the moment? | CRM, cloud provider, analytics tool, payment stack | After qualification, for targeting and timing |
| Demographic | Who do we actually talk to? | Job title, seniority, department, function | After the account is qualified and prioritized |
What is firmographic data?
Firmographic data describes the company itself, not its technology or its people. Industry, employee count, headquarters location, revenue band, and founding year are the standard fields. It is the B2B equivalent of demographics for consumers, which is where the term comes from.
Firmographics do one job well: they qualify an account. A 12-person design agency and a 4,000-person logistics company are different businesses with different budgets, and one field tells you which you are looking at.
The practical advantage is the input. A signup form gives you a work email. The domain in that email resolves to a company profile with a single lookup. No survey question, no sales call, no waiting.
What is technographic data?
Technographic data describes the tools and technologies a company runs. Cloud provider, CRM, analytics stack, payment processor, marketing automation platform.
It answers two questions firmographics cannot. Do we integrate with what they already use, and has something in their stack just changed. A company that just moved off a competitor is a different prospect from one that has run the same tooling for six years, even when their firmographics are identical.
Technographics are also harder to get right. Detection methods vary, and a tag that fired once on a marketing site is not proof that engineering runs the tool in production. Treat coverage claims with more skepticism than you would apply to headcount.
Technographics are on the EnrichLoops roadmap and are marked as upcoming in the product nav. Company data ships today.
What is demographic data in B2B?
Demographic data in B2B describes people: job title, seniority, function, department. It is person-level, which makes it the most sensitive of the three and the most volatile.
Titles change. People leave. A record that was correct in March can be wrong by June, and a single job change can invalidate several fields at once. That volatility is the reason person-level data usually needs a tighter refresh cadence than company-level data.
It is also the layer you need least early. Knowing the VP of Engineering's name is useless if you have not decided the account is worth pursuing. Person-level enrichment (email or LinkedIn to title) is on the EnrichLoops roadmap alongside job-change monitoring.
Which one should you collect first?
Firmographics, and it is not close.
The argument is about decision order, not data quality. Every routing rule you write starts with a question about the account. Is this a target industry? Are they big enough to matter? Should this signup go to sales, to a nurture track, or nowhere? Firmographics answer all three, from a domain you already have.
Technographics refine a decision you can already make. Demographics execute a decision you have already made. Neither one rescues an account you should not have qualified in the first place.
There is a coverage argument too. Firmographics are cheap enough per record to run on 100% of your signups. Person-level data is not, and running it on everything means paying to identify contacts at companies you will never sell to. The order that works is qualify wide, then enrich deep on the accounts that clear the bar.
Rule of thumb: enrich firmographics on every signup, technographics on your qualified segment, and person-level data only on accounts you have decided to work.
Where teams get this wrong
The most common mistake is treating all three as one purchase. A vendor sells "enrichment," a team buys it, and nobody notices that the per-record price includes person-level lookups they run on accounts that were never going to qualify.
The second mistake is asking the user. Onboarding forms that ask "what industry are you in?" and "how many employees?" are collecting firmographic data manually, at the cost of activation friction, when a lookup on their work email domain returns the same fields in one call.
FAQ
Is technographic data a type of firmographic data?
No. Firmographics describe what a company is: industry, headcount, location. Technographics describe what it runs: cloud provider, CRM, payment stack. They come from different detection methods and answer different questions, so most vendors price and ship them separately.
Does demographic data mean the same thing in B2B as in B2C?
Not quite. In B2B, demographic usually means person-level attributes attached to a business context: job title, seniority, function, department. Age and household income are B2C concerns and rarely appear in a B2B enrichment response.
Which should a PLG team collect first?
Firmographics. A domain from a signup form resolves to a company profile with one lookup, and that alone tells you whether the account is worth routing. Technographics and person-level data refine a decision you can already make without them.
Start with the layer that qualifies
If you are building signup routing, firmographics are the only layer you need on day one. Everything else narrows a decision you can already make.
Get an API key and send a domain. The free plan includes 100 credits a month, no card required. The API docs show the fields you get back.