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Prospecting Tools (Home); Unsolicited Mail ; What Criteria? ; Researching the Prospect ; Establishing a Group ; The Introductory Kit ; The Follow-up Call ; First Day's Experience ; The Second Version of the Harvester ; My Working Documents ; Scripts ; My Experience
Unsolicited Mail
Whether as eMail or as postal mail, unsolicited mail is unwelcome. I do send out batches of unsolicited emails, and that technique is discussed later in this essay.
My immediate objective is to obtain two valid and related email addresses from one contact within the target organization.
I seek permission to send an unsolicited email to the target contact with a cc to the contact who suggested I aim at the target.
If I receive an unsolicited email from someone unknown, who cc's, say, Michael Belfry, I make the correct assumption that Michael, who knows me well, must have had a good reason for sending this nobody after me.
I am therefore inclined to accept and open the email.
If the first paragraph of that email grabs my attention, I'm probably going to respond, even if it is only to say "Thanks, keep me informed, but not right now".
Here we go.
If you are sitting at your computer, load your browser and go take a look at Canada News Wire . There you will see up to 300 stories on any regular business day in Canada. The number of press releases drops on the weekend, but 250 to 300 is typical on a working day.
Canada News Wire is a (but not THE) primary source of press releases in Canada.
My job is to examine every news release every day and locate the diamonds that sparkle with the promise of a good match between me and them.
And no, I don't read them at all.
I use a little program called Weather Vain, written in Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word of all things.
Weather Vain uses a table of rules to determine what web page should be accessed (Canada News Wire: yesterday's news ), and where on that page the listing of news reports can be found.
Why yesterday? Because I want to access a complete set of reports, and I don't want to wait until 11:59 today to do so.
When Excel grabs that page, the data is loaded into cells of the spreadsheet, so I need to tell Excel which row and column identifies the first cell.
You can see from the screen shot above that cell B5 is a good starting point. The hyperlink to the first story appears in cell B10, but I am prepared to skip a few empty cells to avoid losing any stories.
Weather Vain will work its way down column B, accessing every hyper linked page; that is, each one of the 300 stories that were filed yesterday.
Each page will be stored as a text file (about 1,000 characters is all) on my hard drive under a folder "MASS".
If the news story satisfies my criteria, a spare copy will be filed in a folder "BASE".
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Toronto and Mississauga, Sunday, December 05, 2010 9:12 PM
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