How should you define the largest companies in the UK? By annual sales? By numbers of staff? Or do you go by the London Stock Exchange definition and buy a mailing list of the FTSE 100?
How you define your top 100 companies should depend on who you are contacting within the company and the product you are marketing. If you are targeting marketing directors, finance directors and CEOs, choose a list of the companies with the highest annual sales; generally speaking, the higher the turnover, the larger the purchasing budget.
But if you are selling to the HR, training, facilities or IT departments, buy a mailing list where companies are ranked by the number of people they employ. The more people it employs, the greater the budget for training courses, HR software, workstations, IT consumables, vehicles, property services and facilities to serve all those people working on the company’s premises every day.
Why not use the Stock Market rankings? The financial press ranks companies by market capitalisation which is share price multiplied by number of shares issued. This method excludes too many companies which you would expect to find on a list of the Top 100 Companies. For instance it excludes all privately owned companies, such as Mars Inc, all partnerships such as John Lewis, PwC, Eversheds plus all those companies that run huge operations in the UK but are listed on stock markets overseas such as Apple, Hitachi or McDonald's.
Financial rankings do include a large number of mining companies, with operations in Africa, Asia and Russia which are using the London Stock Market to raise capital. These companies have very small head offices in the UK, staffed by a handful of people who are not responsible for the company’s main operations and purchasing. The FTSE 100 is no longer a list of UK blue-chip companies.
We’ve compiled our own lists of the UK's Top 100 Companies.
First we’ve ranked the companies by annual sales and below that, by the number of people they employ.
We use these lists as the basis for our mailing lists of the Top 1,000 Companies. Find out more about our lists of the key players in the UK’s largest 1,000 companies here