In many ways, as a Prospector, you must be like a detective. You must be able to utilize the resources at your disposal to find and research prospects. An hour worth of research at home or your library or whereever you may be doing your research will save you hours upon hours in the field of unproductive time. Do your homework ahead of time, make your job as easy as possible.
RESEARCHING PROSPECTS USING REFERENCEUSA
When searching for prospects, ReferenceUSA is the best source that we have found. It is available through your local or county library. You can normally access it through the on-line database section, and is often available from your home through their website. Once there, scroll down to the link for ReferenceUSA and click on the name "ReferenceUSA". This will take you into ReferenceUSA, where you will click on search. This will take you into the "quick search/Custom search" section. Click on "Custom Search". Once in Custom Search, click on City, State, and Year Established. Once you have selected these, click on "create search form". This will create your search form and you should then select your state, and then city, and then select that last five years, so select 2007 through 2002 and then hit search. This will bring up a list of businesses in your selected city that are no older than five years. Now you will want to go down this list and select all of the businesses who's customers would be other businesses. Once you have found them, click on their name and look to see if they have a business owner's name. If so, go to your main menu at the top of your computer to the file menu and select Print. Print only the fist page of each business that fits the above criteria. Pull at least 15 businesses for each day of work so that you have plenty of businesses to go to.
RESEARCHING USING D.O.T. INFORMATION
Using the Federal Motor Safety Administration's website, we can use the D.O.T. numbers on the sides of trucks to gain information about a company. We can also look up businesses by their company name. Using this website, we can gain information that we can then cross reference with ReferenceUSA to learn business locations and business owner's names so that we can follow the system and properly contact the business owner.
Reverse Phone Search through Superpages.com
Superpages.com is a valuable resource, especially when researching referrals that a client may give you. You want to research ALL leads before you go regardless if they are cold market leads or warm market referral leads. Using superpages.com you can look up a business based on their phone number if the business does not come up in ReferenceUSA.
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