Here's something that makes me irrationally angry: watching revenue teams in 2026 build territory plans and ICP definitions around NAICS codes.
I get it—governments need taxonomy. Compliance needs checkboxes. But using a classification system designed for economic census data to drive your go-to-market strategy?
That's like using your social security number as your CRM ID. Technically it works. But why the hell would you?
The NAICS Delusion
Your product-market fit has absolutely nothing to do with six-digit industry codes invented by statisticians in the 90s.
A SaaS company selling to "manufacturing" isn't selling to NAICS 31-33. They're selling to ops leaders drowning in legacy MES systems who've been told to "digitize" without budget or executive air cover.
A fintech targeting "retail" doesn't care about NAICS 44-45. They care about transaction volume, payment rails, and whether the CFO has P&L authority.
NAICS codes describe what businesses ARE. They tell you nothing about what businesses NEED.
The GTM Malpractice I Keep Seeing
I've watched RevOps teams do absolutely unhinged things to make NAICS "work":
- Carving territories by industry code, then wondering why quota attainment is a roulette wheel
- Enriching every account with a code that means nothing to the AE working the deal
- Building lookalike models on firmographic garbage instead of actual behavioral signals
- Spending weeks debating whether a prospect is 541511 or 541512 while the deal sits untouched
Meanwhile, the same teams ignore signals that actually matter: tech stack, hiring velocity, funding events, product usage patterns, intent data.
What People Try Instead (And Why It Still Sucks)
I've seen the workarounds:
LinkedIn's industry picklist – Better than NAICS, but still too broad and completely divorced from buying motion
Custom taxonomies – Sounds smart until you're three years deep in technical debt with 47 overlapping categories and nobody remembers why "Enterprise SaaS - Financial Services Adjacent" is different from "Fintech - Platform"
Amazon-style subcategories – Works great if you have Amazon's data infrastructure. You don't.
None of these solve the actual problem: you're still trying to bucket dynamic businesses into static categories.
Why I Built a NAICS Lookup Tool Anyway
Here's the painful truth: even though NAICS codes are terrible for GTM, you're still stuck dealing with them.
Data vendors use them. Compliance asks for them. Finance needs them for reporting. That one enterprise prospect demands them in the security questionnaire.
So I built a lookup tool—not because I think NAICS is good, but because I'm tired of watching ops teams waste cycles manually mapping codes just to check a box.
It reduces friction. It doesn't solve the underlying stupidity.
The Real Question
If you're a RevOps, Marketing Ops, or Sales Ops leader still using industry codes as a primary segmentation or routing mechanism in 2026, I have one question:
What signal are you actually trying to capture?
If it's "company size in this vertical" → use employee count + revenue + sub-vertical intent data
If it's "buying maturity" → use tech stack, funding stage, hiring patterns
If it's "geographic clustering" → use actual territory geography, not industry proxy
If it's "none of the above, we just inherited this system" → that's honest, and it's time to rebuild
I'm genuinely curious: how are other ops leaders handling this? Are you still routing pipeline by NAICS/SIC? Have you found something better that actually scales? Or are we all just pretending this works while we wait for AI to fix market segmentation?
Drop your take below—especially if you're about to defend NAICS codes. I want to understand what I'm missing.
