I got an email today from Kompass, so I guess I'm still on their list from around 2002 or so.
So they're getting that part right. Although I only remember getting anything from them on very few occasions.
I stay subscribed so I can keep an eye on what they're doing out of interest, and "old times sake".
Old times, before I figured out what "Search" is all about back in 2003. Realistically speaking, it was forced on me.
Like the Yellow Pages, I suppose I'm still surprised they are around after all this time.
When you realise how many millions of people are searching for stuff, the world over, every minute of every day, and that there's ways to tap directly into that and reach them at that crucial moment, it's funny how a company like Kompass is still around.
There's still a lot of their prospects and clients missing the point, even after all this time.
Maybe, you're one of them …
I was fired from my IT Manager's job in 2001 during the dot com crash and 9/11 meltdown. Hundreds of IT professionals were chasing every position going, me among them having known only full time employment for over twenty years.
IT staff were being laid off in every direction, from managers to tech support people, projects were being suspended, spend cancelled, travel abandoned, upgrades forgotten about, hiring frozen, the list goes on.
I was unemployable – too old (42 back then), too experienced and too expensive.
I tried for over a year to get back into work before realising it was a waste of time, and that I had to go it alone to get paid.
But how?
Back then, we were in a pretty good shape. Unusually for a married couple in our area, we didn't both have to work, and Lynne was a housewife having time off from teaching.
When things went bad, we had to scramble around for any opportunity going to save our house and our situation – but we were realistic enough to know we might even need to sacrifice those.
I had been doing some rudimentary web publishing before then on our Company Intranet (and without realising, publishing pages to a standard that Google uses even today to create organic Sitelinks) and quickly came to realise that as a solo agent, it was necessary to have a web presence.
So, like so many others, I bought a web name that seemed to make sense to me (market, what market?) and published my first website. And waited for the customers to come to my freelance IT support service …
I had been using Google for some years following my first discovery of Search Engines, Alta Vista.
I was not appearing in Google search results – why not?
Before I could figure that out, I needed paying work, so I turned to a source I had heard of (being from a B2B background) and decided to rent an email list to get my message heard in the local community who surely needed an IT support person with loads of experience, going cheap …
I negotiated with Kompass to buy a partial list of small to medium local firms who would, in all likelihood, need IT help with their office networks. (I had been running the European IT infrastructure for 12 sites with over 400 employees, and had hired a team of 4).
I bought around 1,400 email addresses, targeted to what I thought would be a receptive audience, from what I was told of the demographic reach.
I then had to split it up into several chunks to get all the emails to send from my own service provider. Then I sat back and waited for the enquiries to come in…
The results?
- About 300 or so delivery failures
- Loads of people telling me to cease and desist emailing them, and to unsubscribe them
- Out of about 1,000 or so successful email deliveries, of which I was hoping for a 1% success rate (meaning around 10 possible new clients) I got a single enquiry for my services
One.
In a thousand.
That's 0.1%
Not conspicuously successful.
(Although I do have to confess I closed this client and they did give me work for a while which helped our precarious situation).
The point?
- Even now, in the age of Search Engines, companies like Kompass are still able to sell their data to companies like yours, trying desperately to generate sales enquires
- Even now, companies like yours will still buy this data, thinking it to be the right way to generate sales and leads
- Even now, telemarketing companies sell their cold calling services to firms like yours who believe that new business can be generated by rudely interupting people who have no interest in you
- Even now, I am interrupted in my daily work by phone calls from people desperate to try and interest me in something that is not relevant to me
Here's more proof from my Gmail account (5th March 2011):
Wyvern Direct Response
Offers a speedy list rental/broking service – reach the right audience
www.wyverndm.co.uk/wdr
Quality UK Consumer Data
Telephone and Mailing Databases Accurate and Cost Effective
www.1stdatasolutions.co.uk
So, now you know what not to do, go now and sin no more!
Be found only when people are searching…
Have what they need…
And, above all, know your numbers …
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