Firmographic and Technographic Criteria for Your ICP

Firmographic criteria describe the company (industry, size, region, stage) and technographic criteria describe its technology (the tools it already runs). Pick the few that separated your wins from your losses, express them as ranges, and make sure you can check each one for a new account in minutes.

The criteria menu

Type	Criterion	Typical use	Watch out for
Firmographic	Industry	Narrow messaging	Often shared by wins and losses
Firmographic	Employee count	Budget and process proxy	Contractors and part-timers blur counts
Firmographic	Revenue or funding	Budget signal	Often private or stale
Firmographic	Location	Support, tax, language	Remote teams span regions
Firmographic	Company age or stage	Maturity proxy	Rough at best
Technographic	CRM or core system	Integration readiness	Detection tools are imperfect
Technographic	Cloud or data platform	Technical fit	Hidden behind firewalls
Technographic	Competitor in use	Displacement play	May be unknown
Situational	Recent hire, funding, migration	Timing	Needs fresh data

BusinessMCP’s ICP guide offers an example of the range style: 20 to 200 employees and $1M to $20M ARR for a fictional firm, and it notes that company size, stack maturity and a specific role often predict fit better than industry. Use those as illustrations of format, not as targets.

Key takeaway: more criteria do not make a better ICP. Choose the three to six that separated wins from losses, and write them as checkable ranges.

How to choose which criteria to keep

Follow the same loop every time.

1. Add each candidate criterion as a column in your deal spreadsheet.
2. Fill it for wins and losses.
3. Keep it only if it appears more often in wins than losses.
4. Drop it if you cannot find it for more than about two thirds of accounts.
5. Rank the survivors by how strongly they separate the two groups.

The step-by-step is in how to create an ICP. The ones that survive become the criteria in your scoring model.

Firmographic criteria in detail

Size. Employee count is the workhorse because it correlates with budget, process and buying committee size. Use a band, not a minimum alone. A 5,000-person company and a 50-person company rarely buy the same way, even if both clear a floor of 20.

Industry. Use it when it genuinely changes the product fit, for example a regulatory requirement. Otherwise it often adds noise, since wins and losses can come from the same sectors.

Region. Tie it to operational reality: languages you support, currencies you invoice in, laws you can comply with. Where regulation matters, check current rules with the relevant authority rather than assuming.

Stage. Startup, growth and mature companies differ in how they buy. If you use stage, define it with something observable such as headcount or funding round.

Technographic criteria in detail

Technology tells you whether the account is ready and whether integration will be easy. A product that sits on top of a CRM wins more easily where one is already in daily use. Useful questions:

• What system must exist before we are useful?
• What existing tool makes us redundant?
• What would we need to integrate with?

Detection is imperfect. Tools that infer tech from public signals miss internal systems, so treat technographic data as a hint and confirm in discovery.

Where to get the data

Source	Strength	Weakness
Your CRM	Reliable for existing deals	Gaps in older records
Company websites	Free and current	Manual
Public registries	Authoritative for legal facts	Limited fields
Company data API	Fast for lists	Coverage varies

For lists of domains, BusinessMCP’s companies data API returns name, industry, size, location, phone and LinkedIn for a company, with a bulk endpoint of up to 100 domains and a search endpoint that returns up to 25 companies per call. Its page states that a lookup with no result is not charged, and that people data is not returned. For a one-off check, the free company lookup tool on the same site is an easy way to see what a record looks like.

Putting it together

A finished criteria section might read: “Employees 20 to 200; B2B software; North America or UK; uses a CRM; hired a head of sales in the last 12 months.” Five lines, all checkable. Add it to the ICP template and then turn it into a list, as covered in building a target account list.

Pitfalls

• Data staleness. Headcount and tools change; refresh before big campaigns.
• False precision. “47 to 53 employees” implies certainty you do not have.
• Using revenue you cannot verify. Private-company revenue is often an estimate.
• Ignoring behaviour. Fit is not intent; pair firmographics with a timing signal.

Next step: test the criteria on a draft

Once you have chosen criteria, test them in the simplest way possible: write them into the draft profile, then see whether the free ICP generator from BusinessMCP output agrees with your own document when you answer its six questions about the same customers. The tool is a template, not an analyst, so disagreement means you answered inconsistently rather than that one of you is wrong. Use any gap as a prompt to revisit the fields.

Examples of criteria written well and badly

Specific wording is the difference between a usable criterion and a decoration. Compare the following pairs.

Badly written	Well written
“Enterprise customers”	“1,000 to 10,000 employees, with a central IT function”
“Tech-forward”	“Runs a cloud data warehouse and a modern CRM”
“Growing fast”	“Headcount up in the last 12 months, based on job postings”
“Global”	“Operations in the US and UK only, English-language support”
“Has budget”	“Budget owner identified in first two calls”

The right-hand column can be checked by a stranger with a browser. The left-hand column is an invitation to argue.

How many criteria are enough

Most profiles work with three to six. Ask of each line: if I removed this, would a rep make a different decision? If not, remove it. Short lists also make a scoring model easier to explain, which matters when sales leadership has to trust the numbers.

Keeping the data fresh

Firmographic and technographic data decay. Companies grow, shrink, merge and change tools. Plan a refresh whenever you launch a campaign, and re-enrich the active target list at least quarterly. Record the date each field was last checked, so a rep can see whether a figure is current. Where a field matters for a deal, such as a regulatory requirement or a data-residency rule, confirm it directly with the prospect rather than relying on a dataset.