Read the columns before you call.

What each column means

Read it the way you would read a spec sheet. Two of these columns are estimates and one is a self-description, and the entries say so rather than letting a rep find out on the phone.

Business name

Whatever the source record carries — the registered entity on some rows, the name over the door on others. It comes through untouched. Tidying it into something neater would only stop it matching the paperwork you eventually put in front of a funder.

Owner

The principal — given name and surname — on the rows that carry one. Plenty do not. Where the name was never captured the cell arrives empty rather than filled with the business name a second time.

Mobile

A cell tied to the person, where a cell was identified. Anything that answers to a front desk goes in the next column instead. Moving one of those over into this one is the cheapest way there is to make a file look better than it is, and it is why contact rate collapses two days into a campaign.

Landline / business phone

The number the business publishes. It works. It is also answered, most of the time, by somebody whose job includes keeping you away from the person you called about.

Email

A business address for the merchant. It does not go through a deliverability check before the file ships unless you put that on the order, and if you do, you get told when it ran.

Street address / City / ST / ZIP

Where the business sits, as the source has it. It filters, and it doubles as a sanity check — an address in the wrong state is usually the first sign a row is not the merchant you assumed it was.

Industry

Sometimes what the owner called himself, sometimes derived from a classification code. Good enough to cut a file by. Not good enough to brief a rep on what the business actually does all day.

Est. monthly revenue

A band, an estimate, and labelled as both. Nobody has handed us this merchant’s statements. A precise figure in this column would be decoration, and the kind of decoration that gets a rep laughed at on the phone.

TIB

Time in business in whole years, rounded down. Four years and eleven months reads as 4.