As a start-up consultant, I often find myself going the extra mile when it comes to getting things up and running. Why do you ask? It’s simple, startups are only successful when everyone gives 110% and sometimes even that is not enough.
Anyway, let me tell you about a pretty illuminating experience I had recently when helping a new business with their grassroots marketing campaign. We first sat the team down and explained how we were going to do some cold calling; telephone meetings, person to person. Really go out and do it, leaving no stone unturned.
The startup I’m helping out with is a B2B company, so we started collecting lists of companies of certain types. We went to the local chambers of commerce and took their printed directories, used the old phone books and Googled every possible category within our target market. We went to Google 300 page deep online directory websites, and since we were looking for easy to reach fruits, we even went to Google maps to find home-based businesses in our specific target business categories.
What we found was quite alarming, though not too surprising in hindsight.
When it came to websites listed on Google that were more or less directory-type websites, it became clear that the information was almost useless, even those on the first few pages of a search. Most of the phone numbers were offline, out of service, or now belonged to someone else who had no idea what the hell we were talking about and never heard of the company we applied for; I’m talking about almost 75%.
When we went to the actual addresses of businesses listed on Google Maps in various cities, we found apartment buildings with new tenants, we found vacant homes for sale, and we found some addresses that didn’t even exist. When we found someone, they would often say they don’t do that anymore, or a tenant they had did, but they moved on. Sometimes it was a former spouse, now divorced, who had moved on.
What were the printed directories of the local Chamber of Commerce like? Well, a little better actually, but not reliable at all, at least a quarter of the businesses were gone and remember this is a year from now as directories are usually printed annually by Chambers of Commerce. How was the phone book? Well, the phone books were about the same, just slightly worse than the Chambers publications, and I guess that makes sense? What waste of money for those companies that advertise?
Moral of the story?
You can’t trust online data, you can’t trust print data, and you sure can’t trust online directory websites that are produced for the best SEO results but are never monitored, removed, or updated .
So what’s my advice? Don’t waste time hanging around, mailing brochures, or paying a team of salespeople to knock on doors unless you know for sure that your information is up-to-date and accurate. I advise buying lists; contact names, email addresses, phone numbers of competent data providers who constantly update their lists. My advice to Google is simple, ‘get your Google sheet together’ and stop promoting fake websites on the first few pages. For all of you startups doing business, think about this.