January is a month when successful financial advisors set goals for the New Year. Here's a three-part goal you may want to consider for reaching out broadly to business prospects in your market.
- Identify companies in your market area and put them into a spreadsheet, database, or mail list management software program.
- Invite them by letter, phone, or both to attend an educational/social event that you will sponsor in the months ahead.
- Encourage them to tell you their most pressing needs in regard to financial services.
To help you achieve this goal with time efficiency, FreeERISA offers a valuable service that you will not find anywhere else on the Web for the same great price-namely, FREE! This service is called EIN Finder. Even the U.S. Department of Labor has acknowledged that FreeERISA is the best place on the Net to get this data quickly and at no cost. See:
EIN Finder will help you cast a "broad net" over a local market area that you define by zip codes, because it summarizes all small businesses contained in the FreeERISA data base that have an Employee Identification Number (EIN) on file. In other words, it doesn't matter what type of entity the company is or what type of plan it has. If the company is anywhere in our database and has an EIN on file, you'll find it in EIN Finder. Note: All employers, including sole proprietors who hire household help (nannies) are required to have an EIN.
A 20-Minute Mailing List
For example, I wanted to organize a mailing list of companies in my neighborhood, defined by the zip codes 10522 and 10706. From the main FreeERISA.com menu, I clicked on "EIN Finder" and then entered those two zip codes separately into "Limit Search to Zip Code." This produced two lists of companies, each sorted alphabetically. Combined, the two lists produced about 200 companies and mailing addresses for an area of 10,000 population. If you are offering any type of business financial service in my neighborhood, this is a valuable list to have.
I wanted to build my mailing list in Microsoft Excel, and the easiest way to move the data from EIN Finder to Excel was via Microsoft Word. I copied and pasted each list into Word and then performed two global "search and replace" edits. In the first, I searched for spaces that separate EIN Finder data fields and replaced them with tabs (^t). In the second, I searched for usages of "EIN:" and replaced them with paragraph marks (^p). This exercise took about five minutes.
After another 15 more minutes of formatting, I imported the Word file into an Excel database. (Although Excel is nominally a spreadsheet, it makes a great database when combined with Microsoft Word's mail merge utility.) About a third of the companies on my list had phone numbers in addition to mail addresses. Also, it appears that about one-third may be individuals who work at home as sole proprietors or hire household help. (Their addresses are on prosperous residential streets, not commercial zones.) But if you're prospecting in affluent neighborhoods, do you mind meeting people like that?
If you already have a database of companies in your market, why not use EIN Finder to expand it, while making sure addresses are current?
Invite Business Owners to an Event
As part of your New Year's resolution to prospect smarter, what can you do with an EIN Finder mail list? My suggestion is to send a letter to each business and follow it up with a phone call. Invite the business owner or proprietor to attend a breakfast, luncheon or open house at which you will offer educational information about a variety of business services, including retirement plans. Team up with a CPA, attorney or other professional to share costs and jointly deliver the program. Make it fun and festive-an opportunity for businesses in your area to get better acquainted with each other. Include a postage-paid reply card, inviting business owners to identify their most pressing financial needs.
We live in a privacy-conscious world. Since most afluent people don't want to have their unique ID numbers floating around, good prospecting data is getting harder to acquire. But thanks to FreeERISA.com, EINs are freely available to anyone who knows how to find them. EIN Finder also gives you addresses and many phone numbers attached to those IDs. Use this unique resource to move closer to businesses in your market during 2003.
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