I recently attended one of Brenda Thomson's excellent Networking World events
and the subject came up at the round table. A few of the patrons
felt that buying in lists was an expensive waste of time as they
were often outdated and inaccurate, so with this in mind I set
about trying to find a low cost means of obtaining an initial list
so that I can get my telemarketers to start hitting the phones. For
us it's pretty simple - we're looking for any type of business that
has between 3 and 15 staff, possibly multiple locations who are
predominantly desktop computer workers, that profile is perfect for
us as they would see immediate benefits in using our service,
obviously this post is not about our services so I digress.
The answer came most unexpectedly. My mother, who is currently
visiting us from the UK. As a retired librarian my mother firmly
believes that you can find anything you ever needed to know in a
book or library if you know where to look. Now this may seem
obvious to most people but my late twentieth century, information
addled brain obviously doesn't think like that. I've been socially
programmed ( or conditioned ) to assume that any information I can
possibly want is available on the internet - which is true - but at
what cost? After a little bit of searching online she determined
that the State Library of
Victoria had exactly what I needed, access to a database that
has business profiles.
After a trip into town to obtain a Library card (when was the
last time I had one of those? or even set foot in a library??) I
was all set to go. Obviously this only applies to Victorian
residents, but I'm fairly sure that similar services are available
in other states. My newly acquired Library card has opened up a
whole new world of opportunity - access to their "Kompass
Australia" database means I can accurately profile and target
businesses drawing up a list for my telemarketers to approach,
fantastic! The best bit is that the service is completely
free!!
Now this may seem obvious or be well known amongst Australian
business owners, but for me having only been in the country for
about a year, it was like a little ray of light in what was
beginning to evolve into a rather complex, expensive and irritating
process - so I thought I would share this titbit with other
readers. This is a sort of follow up post to my post "
Getting your vital statistics… for free!" which is another
handy free thing you can get courtesy of the government.
Enjoy
SP
UPDATE!
IMPORTANT NOTE
A few days after writing this post I checked the
conditions of use for the Kompass Australia database and it very
clearly states:
- Use of databases must be for private research and study
purposes only - no use is allowed for business, commercial or
work-related purposes.
So, when something seems to be too good to be true - chances
are... Nevertheless, this is still a very useful resource for
profiling businesses - I just won't be using it to form the basis
of my list, after all I'm not here to break the conditions of use
of the State Library!
