Most lists are just plain dead.  I waited until December before posting this blog.  Back in Jan 2007, I went to inc.com to review the INC 500 list from 2006.  What I found astonished me.  About 25% of the companies listed did not have a website.  I fired up one of Broadlook’s skunk works tools (Grinder) and quickly found out …that out of 500 companies, I could find a website for 496 of them.  This was right after the list went online.   Keep in mind that the INC list is high-touch. Each company gets interviewed..the works.  Yet at the time of publication, the most important piece of information to learn about a company, the website URL was missing.

Fast forward to Dec 2007:  I just checked:  The list has not been updated.  The list is dead.  Dead. Dead. Dead.

This is why real-time data is soooo important.  If you work with data from online directories, expect it to be dead too.  

Breathelife into a dead list.  Using Broadlook tools Eclipse to pull the list in seconds and Grinder to fill in the missing URL’s, I now have a living, breathing list.  I can run this list through Profiler and get 5, 10, 50 or 100’s of contacts per company.   These names are not going to be found in online databases.  Strategic advantage, all from a dead list.

For those of you who have Broadlook’s Eclipse, I’ve included the “enhanced” INC 500 list at the end of the post, with the missing URL’s filled in.  You can capture it with the “Get table” command in about 5 seconds.

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