How to Categorize Sales Leads by Industry and Company Size in Google Sheets

You just got back from a trade show with 400 badge scans. Or maybe a webinar generated 600 new signups. Or your marketing team just bought a list of 2,000 "qualified" leads from some vendor who promises they're all decision-makers.

Now someone has to actually look at this data and figure out which leads are worth pursuing.

The company names are all over the place. Some have Inc., some have LLC, some are just the brand name. Job titles range from "CEO" to "Digital Marketing Ninja." And there's no consistency in how industries are labeled—if they're labeled at all.

Before you can prioritize, route, or even think about these leads, you need to clean them up and categorize them. That's where most sales teams lose hours.

The Lead Categorization Problem

Here's what usually needs to happen with a raw lead list:

• Industry categorization: Is this a SaaS company? Manufacturing? Healthcare? E-commerce?
• Company size segmentation: Enterprise, mid-market, SMB, or startup?
• Role classification: Decision maker, influencer, or just someone who downloaded a whitepaper?
• Lead quality scoring: Based on the above, is this a hot lead or a long shot?

Doing this manually means looking up each company, making judgment calls on ambiguous data, and maintaining consistency across hundreds of entries. It's tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.

What AI Can Infer From Lead Data

Modern AI is surprisingly good at inferring context from limited data. Given just a company name, it can often determine:

• What industry the company operates in
• Approximate company size (based on public knowledge)
• Whether it's B2B or B2C
• Geographic region

Add a job title, and it can assess:

• Seniority level (C-suite, VP, Manager, Individual Contributor)
• Department (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Operations)
• Decision-making authority

This isn't magic—the AI has been trained on vast amounts of business data and can pattern-match effectively. "Salesforce" is clearly enterprise SaaS. "Dr. Michael's Family Dentistry" is clearly a small healthcare practice. "TechCorp Solutions" is ambiguous and might need manual review.

Setting Up Lead Categorization in Google Sheets

I built Categorize AI to handle exactly this kind of task. Here's how to set it up for lead qualification:

After these passes, your messy lead list becomes a structured, filterable dataset. You can now segment by "Enterprise Healthcare Executives" or "Mid-Market Technology Managers."

Real Example: Before and After

Here's what this looks like in practice:

From here, it's easy to filter for your target segment. If you sell enterprise software to healthcare, you've just found Mercy General Hospital in about 3 seconds instead of scrolling through 400 rows.

Common Category Sets for Sales Teams

Here are some categorization schemes that work well for different sales motions:

For Enterprise Sales

For SMB/Velocity Sales

For Channel/Partner Sales

Lead Scoring With Categorization

Once you have clean categories, you can build a simple lead score right in Google Sheets. Basic example:

Assign point values, sum them up, and you have a prioritized list. The AI-powered categorization gives you the inputs; a simple spreadsheet formula does the scoring.

Routing Leads to the Right Reps

Another common use: once leads are categorized, you can route them automatically.

• By territory: West Coast leads to Sarah, East Coast to Mike
• By segment: Enterprise to the enterprise team, SMB to the velocity team
• By vertical: Healthcare leads to your healthcare specialist
• By language: Spanish-speaking leads to your bilingual rep

With categories in place, this becomes a simple filter-and-assign operation instead of manual review of each lead.

Privacy and Data Handling

Lead data is sensitive—these are potential customers, and mishandling their information isn't just bad for business, it can be a compliance issue.

Categorize AI only reads data from the sheet you're actively working on. It doesn't share them with third parties, or use them for any purpose beyond the categorization you request. The processing happens, results go into your spreadsheet, and that's it.

Getting Started

If you want to try this with your own lead data:

1. Install Categorize AI from the Google Workspace Marketplace
2. Open your lead spreadsheet
3. Set up your first category (industry is usually the best starting point)
4. Select your company name column and run
5. Add additional category passes for company size, seniority, etc.

There's a free trial, so you can test it with your actual leads before committing.

Beyond Initial Categorization

Once you get the hang of AI-powered categorization, you'll find other uses in your sales workflow:

• Win/loss analysis: Categorize closed deals by reason won or lost
• Competitive intelligence: Tag opportunities by which competitor was involved
• Deal stage assessment: Categorize pipeline by likelihood to close
• Customer segmentation: Categorize existing customers for upsell targeting

The Bottom Line

Lead qualification is one of those tasks that's simple in concept but painful in execution. Every sales team knows they should be categorizing and prioritizing leads. Few have the time to do it well.

AI-powered categorization doesn't replace sales judgment—it just does the grunt work faster. Instead of spending half your day figuring out which leads might be worth pursuing, you spend five minutes running a categorization and then focus your energy on the leads that actually matter.

Next time a batch of leads lands in your inbox, you'll know what to do. And you won't be spending the rest of your week on data cleanup.