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Any salesperson or small business owner has a vested interest in building their potential client base. If you are calling on prospects out of a phone book or off of a general list, your calls will sound like cold calls and will be treated as such. Additionally, if you know nothing about the company you are calling, you may be wasting your time anyway. There are companies that generate lists of companies based on industry, annual revenue, sales volume, and hiring patterns. These lists can be ideal, or they may be outdated. Either way, they will cost money, and the return on investment is no guarantee.
Free Database Tools
There are solutions, however, that takes very little research time on your part and cost no money. These are online databases designed to offer solid information about companies; this is information you can use to build a solid contact list based on the criteria you deem most important. Social Mention, for example, is an Internet-wide database that allows you to access articles, blogs, videos, and any other web-based writing that mentions a specific company or industry. Taking the time to move through socialmention.com will give you the up-to-the-minute information about your prospects that makes it possible to offer relevant information on every call.
Another great tool that brings the information to you is Google Alerts. You can find this database tool when you open the Google window. In fact, every time you search a topic in Google, you will be offered the option to set up a Google Alert. If you enter the name of a company you are tracking, you will receive alerts to your email, phone, or both letting you know that a new article or blog has been published online that mentions your selected topic. This service does much of your work for you, giving you information as it occurs.
University And Library Resources
There are databases that are only available through university and library computers that can give you even more specific information that will help you build your business. EBSCOhost, for example, at ebscohost.com, will bring up a wide variety of databases that are accessible through the library you are using. You can simply click on the database you need and you will be shown a long list of the companies in a given area, a given industry, or any other criteria you choose to use.
Another option is ReferenceUSA. Before you visit referenceusa.com, you must first go to https://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/. Here you can look up the specific NAICS code for the industry you are researching. Then, when you go to ReferenceUSA, you can input that code and you will receive a list of companies that meet your criteria, along with pertinent information, including the business name, address, contact information, and the number of employees. You can also learn the number of PCs they have; the sales volume; the expenditures on accounting, contract labor, and advertising; and even their credit rating. Armed with this information, you can predict their needs and directly pinpoint sell, making success far more likely.
