Companies by size
When to filter by size
Company size is another basic filter we reach for when defining an ideal customer profile in a B2B context.
That’s because the sales motion is very different when you target small or mid‑sized businesses versus large enterprises.
With smaller companies, you can often go for self‑serve models, no‑touch or low‑touch sales. As company size increases, it becomes common for any purchase to require approval from multiple decision‑makers — or even different departments.
And that’s just to close the deal.
It’s also common for the size of your target customer to influence how you build your product or service, in order to meet the stronger legal, security and bureaucratic requirements that come with enterprise customers.
For all these reasons, we provide different filters to help you segment companies by size.
Because… what defines a company’s size? Is it revenue? Headcount? Funding? A combination of them?
Whatever “size” means for your team, we have a filter that will help you segment your ideal customers.
Keep reading this article to:
- Find out where we source the data from,
- Understand which size filters we provide,
- And clearly grasp the pitfalls and nuances behind these filters.
Don’t stop reading!
Where the data comes from
Unlike other segments (like geography or industry), company size is a more subjective concept. It involves a wider set of variables and, therefore, multiple data sources are needed to define it.
Revenue data often comes from annual accounts, which are typically public and provided by each country’s Commercial Register.
Those accounts also frequently include the company’s number of employees. When that figure isn’t available in a given country, we estimate it by analysing the company’s digital footprint and looking for references to total headcount on its website, social media or even in news coverage.
As for funding, when a company receives public investment (such as grants or loans), transparency policies usually require it to be made public.
Private funding is a different case. Because it’s a private contract between the company and investors, we can only be aware of it if one party decides to publicise it.
To understand which departments a company has internally, we also analyse its digital footprint. A particularly useful source for this is the job ads the company publishes for each department.
Available filters
Since company size is subjective and differs by sales team, we provide the following filters so you can combine them however you like:
Companies by revenue
Revenue is the most obvious way to classify companies by size.
As revenue grows, similar patterns appear across industries: you stop outsourcing bookkeeping, you build a finance team, internal metric collection and reporting becomes critical (leading to a data team), and so on.
However, comparing companies purely by revenue can be misleading, because the margin of two companies with the same revenue in different sectors can be very, very different.
Companies by number of employees
Another way to define company size is headcount, which is strongly related to revenue — since higher revenue often implies a larger team.
However, the relationship between these variables depends heavily on the business model.
Service businesses, where the “product” is essentially “billable hours”, scale revenue by growing their workforce. Quite simply: more people means more hours to sell.
Product businesses can often grow revenue without directly increasing headcount at the same rate. This is especially notable in technology companies, where revenue per employee ratios can be extremely high.
That’s why the Company Number of Employees filter is particularly valuable when combined with others to refine your ideal customer segmentation.
Companies with funding
It’s not unusual to find companies with no (or very low) revenue, yet with dozens — or even hundreds — of employees.
What kind of dark magic is that?
These companies leverage funding rounds to grow much faster than they could organically.
Because they enter a heavy investment phase, they are high‑potential customers that are hard to identify using only typical revenue and headcount filters.
Want to learn more about the different funding sources and other characteristics of this segmentation? We wrote a dedicated article to help you understand when it’s best to use this filter: Funded companies
Companies by departments
A more indirect way to estimate company size is through the departments it has in its organisational structure.
Depending on the industry and what the company sells, it may make sense to internalise certain critical departments and outsource the rest.
For example, a technology company will often have an engineering team from the very beginning, whereas an architecture studio may never need an in‑house IT team.
That’s why, if your buyer is usually a specific department, relying only on size or industry filters can lead you astray.
For those cases, we had to create a specific filter: Company Department. Simply set it to your target department — and you’re done.
No more guesswork.
One important nuance
Each of the specific filters that define company size is collected from a wide range of different sources, each with its own strengths and limitations.
That’s why we recommend you take the time to read the explanatory article we created for each filter you plan to use in your customer segmentation — so you fully understand the edge cases and possible pitfalls.