One of the mainstay investments of a business house is mailing lists. Third party companies accumulate and compile these databases from the market that businesses buy for networking. But, did you know that your organizational archive already has a bulk of contact data to connect you to new prospects? Just pause the payment to third party providers for a month and do a little digging in places to mine out enormous contact data from your in-house documents. This bulk of contact information can last you for months and reach you to a network of new prospects many of whom are high-value leads.
Business Cards
Start with the drawer of your desk. You may find a pile of business cards lying around that have accumulated over years of business meets, conferences, network events, conventions and the likes. If you have that many business cards filling your drawers, then imagine the stock lying at the disposal of your HR manager, PR person and other representatives who actually receive the visitors. Recall all visiting cards that are available within the house and sort out the ones that you actually need.
Email Signatures
Now scavenge through your inbox funneling emails from entities of interest. Every professional email has a signature at the bottom that features the name and contact details. A little side note is to check the validity of all the response addresses before bulk emailing. This may take you a while and much more than a group effort. Your HR team may be the right appointees for this job as most emails that come to you are either channeled through them or forwarded by them. Assimilate all the shortlisted email signatures in a document.
Gate Entry Logbooks
The gate entry logbooks have the names and numbers of all the visitors who ever came vis-à-vis with you or your representative. You may be able to salvage a large share of contact information of potential leads from these books. Glance through the Purpose of Visit column to find out the leads and prospects from the list.
Magazines and E-zines
Companies mail out their annual magazines to the companies they are interested in having business ties in the future. In most cases, these magazines are either trashed or simply stockpiled in a chest of drawers that are opened only for one reason- to dump a fresh lot of arrivals. It’s time to reopen the archive and scour through.
More often than not, entrepreneurs fail to tap on the infinitesimally small, but potentially rewarding idea of examining their own database for contact information of other companies. If you look long enough and in all the right places, making your own mailing list is not really an over the top idea. There is enough data to salvage from the discarded lot to last you months and get you in touch with leads who you may not find in the mailing list bought from third parties. So, a little search is all there is to it.
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