Issue 219 - Find New Customers on the Cheap

Most everyone has heard of Dun and Bradstreet (http://www.dnb.com) and I would imagine some of you have looked into buying lists from their database for marketing purposes. If not, perhaps you receive some of hundreds of emails I get offering me lists of the newest restaurant openings and food service institutions. With so many people offering to sell you this valuable information it's hard to believe you can get most of it for free...

(Speaking of Valuable Information, if you haven't yet taken the CC4F News Survey please take a moment to do so now. The three minutes you invest now helps us stay on target so we can inform you how to cut costs and save you hours of labor in the future. Click here to take the survey!)

Get the scoop on your prospects. That's right folks, take a look at http://www.manta.com and you'll find a great resource for identifying small and medium size businesses in you market of choice. Let's say for instance you sell to restaurants in Fort Worth, TX but you're specifically targeting pizza shops today. In less time than it took me to type the sentence Manta is displaying the 58 pizza shops in the area. Now that's not all that impressive, you could do that with the yellow pages right? But read on...

If we click one of those 58 pizza shops (I'm going to pick on Bona Pizza) you'll see they show...

Bona Pizza -
150 Throckmorton St
Fort Worth, TX 76102-2868
Contact Phone: (817) 338-0338
Business Category: Eating Place in Fort Worth, TX
Industry (SIC): Restaurants
Est. Annual Sales: $130,000
Est. # of Employees: 5
Est. Empl. at Loc.: 5
Year Started: 1998
SIC #Code: 5812
Contact's Name: Hamerick Nazariyan
Contact's Title: Owner
NAICS: Limited-Service Restaurants

They do it a bit prettier than I did here, and they put a few ads on the page (which is why this service is "free"), but maybe you're still not impressed. What if they gave you the ability to filter your results by revenue, and a contact management system, and a way to keep and share notes about the prospects with other salespeople in your office? Well you're in luck, because they do.

Oh, and one more thing. You might remember I lead off by talking about the Dun and Bradstreet database. Well guess who's database is powering Manta. (If you guessed DnB give yourself a star.)

That's not a bad bit of ammo to hand off to your salespeople, and let's face it salespeople can use every advantage they can get when the go out in the trenches to find you new customers.

Now for the downside. Since this site is trying to make money they show you ads on each page, these are business oriented and fairly on target so not a big deal. They also require you to register for an account to access the advanced features (no charge for the registration though).

I hope you find this site useful and are able to utilize it to increase your customer base. Next week we'll be taking a look at some inspiring work done by John Bellini of Bell Foods to make more of his existing customer base. Last year his company ranked high on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies and he continues to innovate and grow his business. We will also profile what John and Joe Lorenzo have done at Lorenzo Food Group to start a whole new business related to their current distribution model. Lorenzo Food Group expects this new business to double over the next 2 to 3 years. We're going to show you some of the components these guys put together to achieve such dramatic success.

Survey Update: The way-too-early-to-tell results are in - The biggest concern is "rising costs" almost in a dead tie with "managing credit and finances" (both yours and your customer's) the top ranked business management concern is "Employee management and labor cost". - Do you agree or disagree? Take a moment to complete our survey by clicking here.

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