Did you know that Belgium has 200,000 decision-makers ?

Determining who the real bosses are, and all those who take strategic decisions in their companies, is no simple matter. Quite a few studies exist (or have existed) but they are generally based on surveys and rarely on real, factual, accurate data.

Thanks to its data analysis algorithms based on artificial intelligence, our company Inoopa has managed to carry out a real, concrete and accurate study of the number of decision-makers in Belgium. And we can now say that there are no fewer than 200,000 of them, including some 127,000 who either hold the position of CEO or are members of a company board.

Inoopa has managed to determine these precise figures using a very precise methodology and a particularly wide range of data. In fact, our software is capable of analysing in detail the data from the biggest business platform: LinkedIn, among others.

How did we go about it?

First of all, we collected all the decision-maker functions that exist on LinkedIn: CEO, Brand manager, IT director, etc. All the job titles were then grouped together into a series of nine major 'branches', i.e. large groups of functions according to their field: CEO and boards, marketing and sales, purchasing and logistics, finance, human resources, etc. These 'branches' cover all the major areas of activity within each company. These "branches" cover all the major areas of activity within all the sectors of Belgian business. And they make it possible to categorise all the functions. So a brand manager will be included in the "sales and marketing" cluster, while a plant manager should be counted under "purchasing and logistics", for example.

Next, we worked on an essential point in obtaining the number of decision-makers: determining whether they are really managers and decision-makers or 'mere' employees. In other words, we distinguished between all those who report to superiors and those who have the final say and the power to take decisions. This gives us a total of over 200,000 Belgian decision-makers. With, as the table below shows, a majority in the "CEO and boards" branches. Which comes as no surprise. On the other hand, we find that the next largest proportion of decision-makers are in marketing and sales, followed by IT and R&D…

The figures highlighted by Inoopa also show that the Top 3 regions with the most decision-makers are Antwerp, West Flanders and then only Brussels… However, these figures by region need to be tempered. They do not necessarily mean that companies are necessarily based in Antwerp. Rather, it means that the decision-makers live in or come from the province of Antwerp. Indeed, on LinkedIn, users are most often located by their place of residence or origin. A decision-maker categorised in our study as being from Antwerp may therefore also be a decision-maker in Brussels, where he or she works on a daily basis. This may explain why Brussels is in third place in terms of the number of decision-makers.

The algorithms implemented by Inoopa are based on artificial intelligence and NLP (Natural Language Processing), giving our company cutting-edge expertise in semantic analysis, which has enabled us to produce the above figures reliably. But they also allow us to extract public information from contacts. If available, telephone numbers or e-mail addresses can be obtained, in compliance with GDPR rules.

In practical terms, this means that by mixing different filters, we are able, for example, to identify the e-mail addresses of all the IT decision-makers in the Province of Namur or all the HR decision-makers in Antwerp… Two examples among many that demonstrate the power of our technology and open up a huge range of possibilities for analysis, but also for prospecting and marketing!