Salesmen Prospect for Gold with Lists, Drive-Bys

A good salesman has to be practiced in the art of closing a sale, but plenty of legwork goes into generating tips that can lead to a deal.
One obvious place to start is by simply buying a list of tips from a broker.
For the first time, the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal has generated a list of the area’s Largest List Brokers. The list includes the Business Journal’s parent company, Gray Matters LLC of Springdale and three locally owned direct mail companies.
Garth Leer is the operations manager of Target Direct Mailing Services of Springdale. He said the company deals in all sorts of data management and processing, but its bread and butter is in direct mail.
Target can generate a list by any number of demographic and geographic data including age, income and lifestyle for individuals, or annual sales and employee size for businesses.
Bobby Cook, owner of The C3 Group Inc. in Fayetteville, said a list of names becomes more expensive the more specific the information. A general list with the broadest possible demographic, Cook said, will generally run between 7 cents and 8 cents per name. But cull the list to only include males in the 72701 ZIP code who earn $100,000 or more, and the price goes up quickly, though Cook couldn’t say by how much.
Aside from direct mail, Cook said he could sell a targeted prospecting list for telemarketing, but that his customer would need to check their list against the National Do Not Call Registry.
But most salesmen don’t have unlimited resources to buy their tips.
Kristin Butler is a business development manager for Office Depot’s business solutions division. Her territory stretches from Fort Smith north to the Missouri border, and she specializes in cold calling.
When it comes to prospecting in her field, nothing beats good old-fashioned pounding the pavement, Butler said. She has trained her eyes to always be looking for potential clients.
“It’s really important to get to new businesses and establish a relationship,” she said.
Other tools she uses are the area chambers of commerce and the editorial content and the ads in newspapers, she said.
Butler and many other salespeople said a new Northwest Arkansas Web site, gopickle.com, has become a valuable tool for prospect tips.
The site’s business directory is divided into 13 categories, each with subcategories and the information is basically as complete as AT&T’s Yellow Pages.