Business Data: The Complete B2B Guide (Categories, Sources, Enrichment)

Business data is the structured information that describes a company - its identity, size, industry, location, finances, technology and digital footprint. In B2B, it is the raw material that powers prospecting, lead scoring, territory planning and account research. Clean business data tells you who to target and why; stale business data quietly wastes your team's time on accounts that no longer fit.

This guide defines the categories of business data that matter, where each one comes from, how reliable it is, and how to collect and enrich it at scale - directly in Google Sheets.

What is business data? A clear definition

Business data (also called company data or firmographic data) is any attribute that describes an organization rather than an individual. Where contact data answers "who is this person", business data answers "what is this company, and is it a fit".

It sits at the centre of every go-to-market motion. According to Gartner, organizations lose an average of $12.9M per year to poor data quality - and company-level fields (headcount, industry, location) are among the fastest to decay because companies hire, move, rebrand and get acquired constantly.

The 5 categories of business data

Not all business data is equal. These are the five families that drive 90% of B2B targeting decisions:

Where business data comes from

Business data is assembled from public registries (company registers, SEC filings), web sources (the company website, LinkedIn company pages, job boards) and commercial providers who license and clean these at scale. The single most reliable seed is the company domain: from a domain you can resolve almost every other field. The second is the LinkedIn company URL, which carries headcount, industry and recent activity.

How to collect and enrich business data at scale

Manually researching one company takes 5 to 10 minutes. Across a list of 1,000 accounts, that is unworkable. Three approaches scale:

• Enrichment from a domain or LinkedIn URL - paste a column of domains, get firmographics back. The fastest path for an existing list.
• Reverse enrichment from an email - derive the company from a contact's work email, then enrich the company.
• API enrichment - wire company lookups into your CRM or product so records fill themselves on creation.

Why business data decays - and how fast

Company data is not static. Headcount changes every quarter, ~30% of B2B records degrade per year through job changes, relocations and acquisitions. A field that was accurate at import is often wrong six months later. This is why a one-time purchase of a static list underperforms a continuous enrichment workflow: the value is in the refresh, not the snapshot.

Business data use cases by team

The same dataset serves very different jobs depending on the team:

• Sales / SDR - filter a raw list to ICP-fit accounts before any outreach, so reps only work accounts worth working.
• Marketing / ABM - segment by industry, size and tech to run account-specific campaigns.
• RevOps - keep the CRM clean and routing accurate as companies change.
• Founders / GTM - size a market and build a target account list from scratch.

Build vs buy: where Derrick fits

You can build business data collection in-house (scrapers, registry APIs, dedup logic) or buy it from a provider. Building gives control but costs months of engineering and constant maintenance. Buying is faster but locks you into one provider's coverage.

Derrick is the middle path: a Sheets-native layer that cross-references 10+ premium data providers, so you get the coverage of "buy" with the flexibility of "build" - and you only pay for verified matches. Free tier covers 100 credits per month, enough to enrich a first target list before committing.

Start with the right data point

The four guides below cover the highest-value business data points to enrich first - each with free and paid methods, plus the bulk workflow in Sheets.

• Find a company's headquarters and country - territory routing and localization.
• Find a company's industry - the backbone of ICP segmentation.
• Find a company's founding year - maturity and timing signals.
• Find social profiles from a website - complete the digital footprint.