Companies by industry

Why filter companies by their industry

Another common filter that immediately comes to mind when defining an ideal customer profile is the sector the company operates in.

The very nature of each sector means that companies within it tend to face similar challenges and, generally, adopt similar ways of dealing with them: comparable organisational structures, technology stacks, and even a shared jargon.

That’s why, if you already have a customer in a given industry, your product or service is very likely to be useful to many other companies in the same sector.

To support that, we provide several filters so you can segment companies by industry.

When to filter companies by their industry

Even in cases where your products or services are relevant to companies across very different industries, segmenting by industry allows you to adapt your sales messaging to the sector’s own language. That personalisation often helps prospects identify more strongly with your offer.

There are also situations where you’ll want to generate leads across an entire industry, and others where you only want to sell into a specific niche within that sector.

For example, it’s not the same to sell to any law firm as it is to target firms specialising in intellectual property.

That’s why we also offer filters with different levels of detail, to match those two scenarios.

Keep reading this article to:

• Find out where we source the data from,
• Understand which industry filters we provide,
• And clearly grasp the pitfalls and nuances behind these filters.

Don’t stop reading!

Where the data comes from

Each country typically has an official coding system that parametrises all industries.

As with many things, what sounds great in theory (order and clarity) becomes a real mess in practice.

It’s common to find national and supra‑national codes that don’t map cleanly to each other because each classification emphasises different industries (and assigns a different number of codes to them).

It’s also not rare to find multiple versions of classifications coexisting — where, in theory, one is obsolete and has been replaced by another, but in practice it’s still used exclusively by many government entities.

In all these cases, whenever possible we try to follow international mapping tables to add clarity. And we define our own mappings between classifications when no international standard exists (or is available).

Available filters

To help you segment companies by their sector of activity, we provide the following filters:

Companies by curated industry

Sometimes official codes are simply too granular for the segmentation you want to build.

This happens when you want to generate leads, for example, among law firms regardless of whether they focus on corporate law, immigration, criminal law, etc. Or if you want to target telecommunications, mining, pharmaceutical companies, and so on.

You know what I mean, right?

To make your life easier — so you don’t have to gather the 10, 15 or 20 codes that often make up one “industry” — we created our own simplified classification.

Companies by CNAE code

The National Classification of Economic Activities (CNAE) is the official coding system in force in Spain since 2009.

Companies by NACE code

The Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community, called NACE because some bureaucrat thought it was a good idea, is Europe’s official coding system since 2006 and the European implementation of the United Nations’ International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC).

Companies by UKSIC code

The United Kingdom Standard Industrial Classification of Economic Activities (UKSIC) is the classification system in force in the UK.

Originally derived from the SIC classification created in the United States in 1937, the current version is specific to the UK and was last updated in 2007.

One important nuance

We’ve already done the (serious) work of building equivalences between all the national and supra‑national coding systems we support — so you don’t have to.

As a result, every company in our database, regardless of country, is assigned an industry code in each available classification. So whichever classification you use, you can be confident you’re not leaving companies out.

Our recommendation to keep things simple is: if you want to filter by an official classification, use the one you find most convenient or are most familiar with (for example, CNAE) and ignore the rest (NACE, SIC, ISIC, ...).