Do You Ever Use the City Directory to Prospect?

[Mark]

Do you ever use the City Directory to Prospect?

Most cities have a city directory that you can buy for under $25. It is not like the phone book. It can have how many people live in a home, if they are married, date of birth and some other good details.

I know it is not like it use to be, but it may still have some value in it.

 

[Todd King]

How about a Polk Directory?

 

[Newby]

I used to buy Polk directories every year. They were about $250 to $500 depending on the population.

It's a different world now though with DNC and Internet info.

 

[Mark]

Okay, I will ask the dumb question.

What is a Polk Directory? I would guess it has more detailed info. At least for that kind of a price.

 

[Bob_The_Insurance_Guy]

The libraries here have the Criss Cross Directory. They have listings by street. Demographic information is listed, including salary range, how many in household, etc.

Never used it, but it's there.

 

[Newby]

Okay, I will ask the dumb question.

What is a Polk Directory? I would guess it has more detailed info. At least for that kind of a price.

R.L. Polk Directories (formerly Bennett Directories) are the books that all business bought every year for their city info. They had a section that listed people by address (so you could look up any street and tell who lived in each house.) also told where they worked and if they owned or rented. Even had unlisted phone people but NOT their phone number.

They also had a section that listed everybody in order of their phone number. So you could call 482-1298, then 482-1299, then 482-1300 etc and know who you were calling. The good telemarketers knew to call the gap (unlisted phone numbers) in that section because they rarely got called.

Mark I can't believe your dad doesn't have a whole stack of R.L. Polks going back for decades.

 

[Mark]

Mark I can't believe your dad doesn't have a whole stack of R.L. Polks going back for decades.

He has much junk then I can go through. He still had an 8 track in his office.


I don't look through the old stuff very often.

Mayb I need to.


I wonder home many people will put their info in the city directory? It askes a lot of questions, like email address, birthdates and other stuff that I would like to have access to.

 

[Sales71]

The libraries here have the Criss Cross Directory. They have listings by street. Demographic information is listed, including salary range, how many in household, etc.

Never used it, but it's there.

When i first started in insurcane in 1998 the rep from Criss cross directory came to my office and put me together and I bouth it.
It cost 1K a year man that was the worst money I ever spent.

 

[Cenla Agent]

I've never used one for insurance prospecting but used a city directory for marketing in a different industry about a decade ago. I think it was Polk but it may have been criss-cross.

I don't think anybody puts their info in there, at least not the regular listings. My understanding is that the information is gleaned from public records or other publicly available sources. Because of that, the information was sometimes out of date and perhaps inaccurate at times.

I would imagine equivalent web based services now will be much more likely to provide up to date information. I've never used it that much, but I think Sales Genie and probably some other resources have similar capabilities with at least some of the features.

 

[Newby]

The best data I've found is voter registration lists. You have to grease a few palms to get those though.