For those who are in a B2B business (business to business, that is, a company that sells to other companies) and are going to work with outbound sales , actively seeking out leads, the first task to be carried out is to identify potential targets. This work is done through market segmentation. The larger and more detailed the database used to perform this segmentation, the greater the potential for a prospect to become a customer ( higher lead score ).
The B2B business universe in Brazil
Let's look at the numbers in Brazil. According to Empresômetro , there are 17.5 million active CNPJs in Brazil. However, not all of this number corresponds to companies, as other entities also have CNPJs, such as taiwan email list associations, investment funds, political parties and others. Brazil is one of the countries in the world with the highest number of companies per inhabitant, around one company for every 24 inhabitants (according to G1 ).
Detailing only the organizations considered companies (identification made by Legal Nature), according to Empresômetro, we have the following numbers:
Data from 16/01/2015:
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Typically, organizations registered as an entrepreneur or individual company are made up of just one person, are very small and, in most cases, irrelevant to a B2B business.
Thus, the total market potential for B2B businesses in Brazil, in general, is a maximum of 6.4 million companies.
Segmenting the market and hitting the target
Of course, each individual business meets specific requirements for only a portion of this number. Requirements may include average ticket price, industry, company size, revenue, number of employees, and location. Depending on these requirements, the size of the target market may vary.
One way to search for potential business prospects is through LinkedIn . One of the interesting filters that the tool has is, through advanced search, to filter companies by the number of employees. This allows you to segment your target audience using the number of employees as a proxy for company size.
The main problem with Linkedin is the low number of companies registered in Brazil. A quick search on the tool returns just over 70,000 companies (data from January 2015). In addition, the way companies are classified by sector is poorer when they are not Information Technology companies.
For a more comprehensive segmentation, which presents details about the company's sector and encompasses a much larger portion of companies in Brazil, you can use the Econodata Platform , which concentrates millions of CNPJs of active companies in Brazil , according to the criteria described in this post (not counting government agencies), a database that is growing and constantly being updated.