Page 163 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

151 Quick Ideas to Get New Customers

Epilogue
When your prospects find out that you don’t know, they’ll
think you don’t really care about them and they won’t deal
with you.

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Create Your Personal Gold Mine

Do you know what is more worthless than yesterday’s
newspaper, week-old bread, or a five-year-old phonebook? It’s
a database that isn’t accurate. Your future success in winning
over new customers will be determined largely by the quality
and quantity of your prospect list. Today is the best opportunity
you will ever have to make a commitment to keep that list up to
date, accurate, and on target.

Early on, Joanne realized Assignment
how powerful and accurate a

well-maintained, up-to-date Create a form that ev-

list of prospects can be. She eryone can use to notify you

made a commitment to do when changes come about,

several things to keep that and have it by their phones

database accurate. First, she or desk so they can pass it

decided that any time she was along.

notified of a change by people

in her company, she would pick up the telephone and verify the

information with the prospect. Second, she alerted coworkers in

her company to pass along any information they got about changes

in a prospect situation. This included people, phone numbers, or

addresses. Third, on all mailings to prospects, she put the term

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