How to Sift Through Addresses and Get Rid of The Washouts

Making cold calls is a bit like panning for gold. Gold panners will find themselves a river or creek with likely deposits, scoop some sediment and water into their pan and start stirring and fingering to get stratification going. In the end, the denser material (not only gold) will sink to the bottom while the other stuff is washed out.

The wet sediment I work with is the list of addresses I call. The leads I get from this are the denser material. By and by, more and more of that is washed out leaving specks of gold, sometimes nuggets, i.e. prospects - businesses with a real interest in my clients' products / services.

I don't know how panners pick their spots. I haven't got the first clue about geology or gold mining. On the other hand, I can tell you a thing or two about addresses for cold calls. How to find them and what to do with them.

Ideally, my client will provide me with a ready list of addresses to call as part of an overall marketing strategy. Well, that sort of thing has happened in the past - but not very often. SMEs often lack a strategy regarding marketing or anything else.

Sometimes, my clients give me a list of addresses that they have bought from some commercial source. Allegedly, these dearly bought addresses are 'qualified', meaning somebody has checked and keeps checking the correctness of the information. Additionally, the list will also give you the name and position of the correct person to talk to (head of HR, finance or whatever).

Well, dream on. I doubt it would be economically viable to employ enough people for such a constant vetting process. In my experience (admittedly somewhat in the past), a considerable part of such commercially provided addresses (5%, 10% or more) contains mistakes: The phone number is wrong (or missing) or the company doesn't exist any more or has changed location. Or something else is wrong.

My favorite example iss a list that contained as a potential contact one of Germany's many intelligence agencies. I kid you not!!! Let me assure you that my client's services were of no possible interest to an intelligence agency. The only possible conclusion is that nobody had so much as cast a superficial look at this list - before selling it to my client.

Generally, my clients offer services that are quite generic. They are potentially of use to very many, if not all businesses at least in a given industry. They don't need very specific lists of addresses.

They need lists with reliable information so I don't make too many pointless calls. They need to have a lot of entries so I can work with them for weeks on end. The lists must provide the locations of the businesses. The phone numbers must be in it or quickly accessible. Ideally, size and industry can be made out. And it certainly doesn't harm if it costs nothing.

What I don't need is the names of specific persons. If they are available, the switchboard will tell me who is in charge. If they are not, I will not be put through if I know the name or not.

I prefer to work with address lists that are in the public domain. And no, I don't mean the online yellow pages. There is nothing wrong in principle with the yellow pages, but they either give you a wild hodgepodge of businesses or only very short lists within a specific industry in one city.

I prefer to work with the membership lists of trade associations. Very often (not always) they are freely accessible online and will give you everything: name, address, phone number etc. Sometimes, you have to click a link to get the phone number, but this is only a slight inconvenience. Those lists are well maintained by the relevant trade association and often have hundreds if not thousands of entries. All I need to do is to copy and paste them into a word document and I can start making calls.

If I only want businesses in certain regions, I only call those with certain zip codes in their addresses. If I want only businesses that are not mum-and-pops shops, I will exclusively call numbers that end in zero. In Germany, this indicates there is a designated switch board and thus a certain size. This is a mere rule of thumb, of course, but it is quicker and therefore cheaper to call and find out than to do lengthy online research.

Once I am calling businesses, it is a process of elimination. After each call, I must decide if it is worthwhile to call again at a later date. Often that is easy. The other person tells me explicitly that they are not interested. Or they ask me to call in a few months because they will have a plan and/or budget then. Or I can feel that there is a desire / need but management is blocking at the moment. Or I get to email them some brochures. Or there is just a good atmosphere during the conversation.

Of course, I must and will take care my capacity is not gummed up by old and useless leads and that I don't invest more calls than necessary in the others. I tend to be generous, though. I don't call too often but until I get a result (positive or negative). Often, months or even years will pass before a lead turns into a prospect. But I get there in the end.

Panning for gold takes perseverance.