InfoUSA Lets Your Fingers Do the Walking for Business Research

Unless you have more business than you can handle, you probably spend at least some of your time prospecting. Regardless of what type of business you’re in, you need to know who your potential customers are and how to find them.

For 28 years InfoUSA Inc., a publicly traded company, has been providing data about consumers and businesses for use in market research, creating sales leads and making credit decisions. In June the company created a division--InfoUSA.com--that provides easy access to business data via the Internet.

To begin with, the company provides free access to white and yellow pages information. From the Web site (https://www.InfoUSA.com) or the site of one of its many partners, including Yahoo and Switchboard.com, you can look up individuals or businesses by name, location and business type. You can also do a reverse lookup if you know only the telephone number. If you enter (718) 293-4300, for example, you’ll find out that it belongs to Yankee Stadium in Bronx, N.Y.

One of the company’s newest products is Customer Analyzer. Designed for small businesses that sell to other businesses, it helps you “clone” your business customers by finding similar businesses in your own area or in new markets.

There is no charge to register for the service or conduct a search, but you will have to pay if you wish to download a detailed report. Once registered, you start by typing or uploading the telephone numbers of one or more of your existing customers. The site recommends that you enter at least 25 so they can get a better sense of the type of businesses that you deal with, but you can get away with fewer. The company says it will not use or share the information you enter.

After you enter the numbers, you specify the geographic area you wish to target. It can be a ZIP Code, city, metropolitan area, county, state or the entire country.

I entered the phone numbers of several local coffee shops and a few minutes later got a listing of nearly 1,200 coffee shops in California. If I were in the business of selling coffee beans or supplies I’d have a good list of prospects to call on.

For free, you get the name, city and state of each prospect. If you know how to find the business in your local area or want to take the time to look them up on InfoUSA’s free business search database, you could quit right there with some useful information.

If you want more detail about one or more companies, you check off each name (or select all prospects) and for 10 cents to $1 per listing, depending on the size of the list you order, you get a report that includes company name, address, phone number, number of employees, sales volume (in dollars), phone number, fax number, industry, credit rating and the number of years the business has been in InfoUSA’s database.

The data can be printed or downloaded as a data file that can be imported into ACT, Excel, Microsoft Outlook or just about any computer database.

The credit rating is just a general indication such as “good” or “very good,” “satisfactory,” “unknown” or “professional”--used for lawyers, accountants and other sole practitioners for whom they do not have credit information. InfoUSA.com says it has information on 12 million businesses, which it gets from a variety of sources, including telephone books and other public records. They also call each business on their list at least twice a year to find out names of key contacts and other data, according to CEO Bill Chase.

If you market to consumers, InfoUSA also has information on more than 120 million households that you can search by age, gender, marital status, ethnic surname, estimated home value, homeowner/renter status and geography. I did a search for married Ukrainian men in California with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 who own their own homes and--for what it’s worth--I came up with 86 individuals.

While there is nothing new about the type of data available at InfoUSA.com, what is new is how easy it is to access. It took me only a few minutes to learn how to use the site, and--once you enter a credit card number--the information is immediately available.

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Technology reports by Lawrence J. Magid can be heard at 2:10 p.m. weekdays on the KNX (1070) Technology Hour. He can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web site is at https://www.larrysworld.com.