✨ AI Prospecting: The future of prospecting for SMBs is here — sign up for early access.
Here’s an age old problem when selling to SMBs: a solo-preneur plumber and a 250 person plumbing business might look the same in ZoomInfo or on LinkedIn.
We’ve found a highly effective, creative strategy for predicting the size of a small business. Read on to find out how.
Why Size Matters
When a new lead hits your CRM, the first question is, “How big are they?”
The answer guides everything — from who should work the deal, to the urgency of your outreach. Yet millions of small and mid-sized businesses leave few public breadcrumbs: no SEC filings, patchy LinkedIn data, and sometimes no website at all. This causes reps to spend most of their deals that aren’t actually worth their time.
How to Predict the Size of a Small Business
In absence of any clear datapoint on employee size or revenue of a business, Orbital has found it’s still possible to consistently and confidently predict the size of business.
How? The secret is looking at a number of different proxies for business size.
Today, Orbital triangulates 15+ different public and proprietary data points in order to predict the revenue and employee size. For example:
Number of locations
Google review count
Social followers (FB / IG)
Yelp review count
Current software used
Credit card history
Years in business
…and a handful of proprietary data points
Any given small business might only have a few detectable data points from the above set, but by building a scoring model based on many data points, you can consistently predict business size.
We’ve found returning a simple S, M, L, XL business size is the easiest way to drive clear action on the lead, without falling into the trap of false precision.
Why a Blended Business Size Score Beats Single-Source Data
Typical Tools | Orbital |
|---|---|
Single field (employees) can be stale or missing | 15-signal majority vote corrects outliers |
Raw numbers, user must interpret | Human-friendly tier label + confidence |
Limited coverage for micro-businesses | Finds data points for even the smallest business |
Real-World Impact
If You — | Orbital Helps You — |
|---|---|
Qualify leads | Instantly route XS/Small to SMB reps, XL to enterprise AEs |
Personalize outreach | Tailor messaging to an XS bakery vs. a Large regional chain |
Segment marketing | Run campaigns by tier—different pain points, budgets, buying cycles |
Save time | Reps stop Googling every lead; size is pre-tagged with confidence |
Final Takeaway
Sizing SMBs shouldn’t be guesswork. Using a multi-signal business size model gives you the right tier, right away — so your team can work smarter and close faster.
