If you're a field sales rep or account executive managing named accounts at industrial companies, you've run into this problem: your CRM shows one HQ record for a Fortune 500 that actually runs 87 plants. Pitch from that record, and you're competing on one-hundredth of the real account.
Before you pitch Greif, you should know they have 118 facilities in 30 states — not one.
That number is the gap between what most B2B databases show and what Greif actually looks like on the ground. A CRM-enriched record for Greif gives you a headquarters in Delaware, Ohio, and maybe a handful of divisional addresses if you're lucky. The 118 steel drum plants, fibre drum operations, and reconditioning facilities — each with its own plant manager, maintenance director, and purchasing contact — don't exist in your data.
Greif is not an unusual case. It is the standard case for industrial companies. And if your prospecting starts and ends with the HQ record, you are competing on one-hundredth of the real account.
This post walks through how field sales reps and AEs currently research parent/child company structures, why each method breaks down, and how to do the same research in three minutes using Facilities Finder.
Account managers expanding an existing relationship will find the parent-rollup workflow equally relevant — see the "Who this matters for most" section.
Why this is actually hard
Most B2B databases are built on corporate registration data — state filings, SEC records, web crawls of "About" pages. Corporate registrations track legal entities. They don't track physical plants.
A holding company that operates 50 plants may be registered as a single Delaware LLC. Its subsidiaries might be filed under four different state business registrations with none of those names recognizable as the parent brand. The gap between "legal entity" and "operating facility" is where standard enrichment tools fall apart.
The problem compounds when a parent company grows through acquisition. Greif acquired Caraustar Industries in 2019. Berry Global has acquired more than a dozen packaging companies over the past decade. Each acquisition adds a new set of plants, often still operating under the acquired brand's name — plants that may not appear in any database under the parent company's name at all.
The result: your enrichment tool returns one record. The company operates 50–200 facilities. You have no idea.
The manual way: 5 steps sales reps actually try
Step 1: Google "[Company Name] locations"
This is the natural first move. Search "Greif locations" and you'll get the Greif investor-relations page, a few press releases, and maybe a partial map from their corporate website. You won't get a structured, exportable list of facilities. You'll get marketing copy.
Consumer brands like Starbucks or McDonald's have well-indexed Google Business Profiles for every location. B2B manufacturers don't. A packaging plant in Massillon, Ohio has no reason to maintain a Google Business Profile.
Estimated output: 5–15 locations, usually headquarters and regional distribution hubs. Time: 20–30 minutes of clicking and copy-pasting.
Step 2: LinkedIn "Associated Pages"
LinkedIn's Company Page feature includes a tab for associated subsidiary pages. For a large conglomerate, this will surface subsidiaries that have their own LinkedIn presence. It does not surface subsidiaries that never created one — which includes most regional operating companies, newly acquired brands, and every plant that doesn't have its own HR team running a LinkedIn page.
More fundamentally: LinkedIn's company address is whatever the company entered in their LinkedIn profile setup. That's almost always HQ. Branch addresses from individual employees' location fields don't aggregate anywhere usable.
Estimated output: 3–8 subsidiary company names, most pointing to HQ addresses. Zero facility-level contacts. Time: 15–25 minutes.
Step 3: Pull the 10-K Exhibit 21
Public companies file an annual 10-K with the SEC. Exhibit 21 lists all "significant" subsidiaries — the subsidiary name and the jurisdiction of incorporation.
Here's what Exhibit 21 does not include: addresses, number of operating plants per subsidiary, employee counts by location, or any indication of which subsidiaries are operating plants versus holding-company shells. A typical Exhibit 21 for a mid-sized manufacturer reads like a list of LLC names and state abbreviations. It tells you which legal entities exist. It tells you nothing about where those entities operate.
For private companies — the majority of US manufacturing — there is no Exhibit 21. There's nothing.
Estimated output: A list of subsidiary names with no location data. Time: 30–45 minutes to find, download, and parse the filing.
Step 4: Navigate D&B's family tree
Dun & Bradstreet's DUNS hierarchy is the most structured parent/child company dataset available without a specialized tool. It links companies via a three-tier structure: Global Ultimate, Domestic Ultimate, and Branch/Division.
The problem is that DUNS numbers are assigned to legal entities, not to operating plants. A single LLC might run 20 plants under one DUNS number. Branch records in the D&B hierarchy represent addresses that were on file at some point — not verified current operating status. Companies move, close plants, and consolidate operations without updating their D&B records.
The other problem is access. Full D&B family-tree data requires a D&B Direct or Hoovers enterprise subscription. Those products are priced for credit and risk teams, not field sales reps. Even with access, the interface is built for due diligence workflows, not for building a prospect list in 15 minutes.
Estimated output: 20–60% of actual facilities, depending on company size and how recently the record was updated. Significant stale data. Time: 45–90 minutes to navigate and export.
Step 5: Check the corporate "Our Locations" page
Most mid-to-large manufacturers have a page on their website that pins plant locations on a map or lists them in a table. This is often the cleanest data source of the five — if the company maintains it.
The core problem is staleness. Corporate locations pages are owned by the marketing team. When a plant closes, gets sold, or changes function, operations knows immediately. Marketing updates the website in 6–24 months, if ever. For a company that has gone through M&A activity, the locations page may not have been updated since before the acquisition.
There are no contacts per location. There is no NAICS or facility-type data. You still need to manually cross-reference against a contact database.
Estimated output: 40–70% of actual facilities if the page is recent, less if the company has been acquisitive. Time: 20–30 minutes of copying and reformatting.
Why the manual way breaks at scale
Add up the time across all five steps for a single company: 2–3 hours minimum, assuming everything goes well. If the company is private, you lose the 10-K option entirely. If they haven't maintained their corporate website, you lose Step 5. If they've done acquisitions, the LinkedIn and D&B data is fragmented across old brand names.
The deeper problem is that even when the manual method "works," it finds 40–60% of the real footprint. For a company like Greif, that means finding 50–70 of the 118 facilities — the obvious ones, at major hubs, in the states with the most industrial activity. The plants in secondary markets, the recently acquired operations, the facilities running under an old brand name: those stay invisible.
You are pitching the same 50–70 facilities that every competitor using the same methods has also found. The 40–50 plants nobody has mapped are sitting there, uncontested.
There is also a contact problem. None of the manual methods produce facility-level contacts. You find a plant address. You do not know who the plant manager is. You're back to LinkedIn, searching for "[Greif] [plant city] [operations]" and hoping someone's job title says "Plant Manager, Massillon."
The Facilities Finder way: 3 steps
Step 1: Search by parent company name
In Facilities Finder, enter the parent company name in the company search field. The platform queries the company_profiles table, which maintains parent-company records linked to every facility in the database via a parent company ID.
This is not the same as a company name search that matches string text. It is a structural relationship — the parent record connects to child facility records directly, regardless of which operating subsidiary name appears on the plant's door.
For Greif, the search returns the Greif parent record. One click expands the full facility rollup.
Step 2: See all facilities pinned on the map with contacts per site
The result is a map view with every Greif facility pinned — 118 locations across 30 states. Each pin represents an independently enriched facility record, not a corporate hierarchy entry pointing to HQ.
Each facility record includes:
- Physical address (verified against operational data, not registration filing)
- Employee count at that location
- Facility type (plant, distribution center, reconditioning facility, regional office)
- Industry and product classification for that specific site — AI-generated from what the plant actually produces
- Decision-maker contacts: plant manager, operations director, maintenance manager, and purchasing contacts specific to that location
You can filter immediately. If you cover the Midwest, filter to Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. If you sell to steel drum operations specifically, filter by facility type. If your ICP is plants with 100+ employees, set the employee range. The 118 facilities narrow to the exact slice relevant to your territory.
Worked example — Greif, Southeast region: A rep covering the Southeast pulls up Greif in Facilities Finder. The parent lookup returns 23 Greif facilities in the Southeast region — Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Florida. Their CRM had 2 Greif records: the Delaware HQ and a regional office in Atlanta. That's a 23:2 ratio. Each of those 23 facilities has a plant manager in the database. That's 21 new contacts the rep had never seen.
Step 3: Save as a territory — the accounts live in the built-in CRM
Once you have the facility list filtered to your relevant scope, save it.
The accounts live in the built-in CRM. Each facility auto-creates its own account record in the Facilities Finder pipeline — with its own address, plant-level contacts, and facility attributes. You're not working one HQ record — you're working 23 individually enriched location records, each with its own deal, notes, and activity. The territory, the accounts, the contacts, and the deal pipeline all live in the same system. No CSV round-trip. No separate CRM to sync into.
Save as a territory. If you want ongoing coverage of all Greif facilities in your region — including any that are added or updated in the future — save the filtered view as a named territory. New Greif facilities that match your filters surface automatically when the database is updated, and flow directly into the rep's pipeline.
Manual vs Facilities Finder: comparison
| Manual (Google + LinkedIn + 10-K + D&B) | Facilities Finder | |
|---|---|---|
| Time per company | 1.5–2.5 hours | 2–3 minutes |
| Facilities found (vs. actual) | 40–60% | 90–95% |
| Contact depth | HQ contacts only | Per-facility decision-makers |
| Works for private companies | Partial (no 10-K; website and D&B only) | Yes — private companies included |
| Handles acquired brands | No — acquired plants appear under old names | Yes — rolled up under parent ID |
| Built-in CRM | CSV export → Excel dedupe → manual CRM import | Native pipeline — each facility auto-creates an account with plant-level contacts |
| Stays current | Never — requires re-running all steps | Updated when database refreshes |
Who this matters for most
Field sales reps with named accounts. If you have a list of 20–50 target accounts and you're measured on coverage of those accounts, the parent-lookup workflow is table stakes. You cannot claim to be covering a Greif account if you have 3 records and they operate 118 plants.
Account managers expanding existing relationships. You've landed at one Greif facility. How many others could you be serving? The parent rollup tells you in 30 seconds. The answer is often: a lot.
Sales ops and RevOps teams building territory assignments. If you're splitting a national territory across 8 reps and your company sells to large industrial accounts, you need facility-level data to divide the territory fairly. Assigning "Greif" to one rep is meaningless if Greif has 15 plants in one rep's geography and 1 in another's. Assigning 118 facilities geographically creates equity.
ABM marketers building target account lists. A parent-level account for Greif in your ABM platform represents one marketing target. Eighteen contacts across 118 facilities represents a real campaign.
A note on private companies
The majority of US manufacturing facilities are owned by private companies. No Exhibit 21. No investor relations page. Often no LinkedIn company page worth reviewing. The manual research methods above get significantly worse for private companies because the SEC and LinkedIn sources disappear entirely.
Facilities Finder's data model does not distinguish between public and private companies. The company_profiles parent rollup works the same way for a private company with 40 plants in the Southeast as it does for a NYSE-listed conglomerate. The research workflow is identical.
Common mistakes when researching company footprints
Stopping at subsidiary names without mapping them to locations. An Exhibit 21 might list "Greif Packaging, LLC (Ohio)." That tells you a subsidiary exists in Ohio. It does not tell you where the plants are, how many there are, or who runs them.
Treating the corporate website as ground truth. A locations page published two years ago reflects what the company wanted the world to know two years ago. Post-acquisition integrations, plant consolidations, and greenfield openings happen constantly. Marketing pages don't keep up.
Enriching the parent company instead of the facilities. If you push "Greif" into your CRM and enrich with standard tools, you get one record. Even if the enrichment is accurate for the HQ, you have not enriched the account — you've enriched a name on a door in Delaware.
Using LinkedIn headcount as a proxy for plant count. LinkedIn's employee count for a parent company represents the total headcount across all locations. It says nothing about how many distinct sites there are or how they're distributed.
Start with your next target account
If you're selling to industrial companies, the cost of HQ-level data is measurable: accounts pitched at one-hundredth of their real footprint, plant managers you never found, and competitors who walked into the other 40 plants while you were working the same two CRM records.
Facilities Finder indexes every US industrial facility as its own first-class record — not a branch entry bolted onto a corporate hierarchy. The parent-company rollup connects every plant, distribution center, and reconditioning facility back to the parent ID, so one search on "Greif" returns all 118 US facilities across 30 states, each with its own plant-level contacts: plant manager, operations director, maintenance manager, and purchasing. For account managers with an existing foothold at one plant, the same search surfaces every other location in the parent's network — and how many of them you haven't touched yet.
Facilities Finder covers 600,000+ US industrial facilities across all 50 states, including private companies with no SEC filings or investor relations pages. Our AI ingests billions of public signals — satellite imagery, map providers, company websites, EPA filings, permit records, trade publications — and extracts what actually matters: products, capabilities, employees, certifications. Every facility record is the output of that enrichment, not a data entry from a state filing.
Look up your next target account's full footprint — start the parent-company search.