“Salespeople and professionals have been told forever to research their prospects and markets, but, frankly, very few do because research has either been time intensive or expensive,” claims author, speaker, sales trainer, and management consultant, Paul McCord. “To date, you’ve been required to spend a great deal of time if you wanted to perform you own research, or you’ve had to pay a company anywhere from $25 to several hundred dollars per prospect to do the research for you. For the vast majority of salespeople, professionals and small companies, the time or monetary investment has been prohibitive.”

McCord has sought to do something about this situation and today announces the unveiling of a website, www.businessresearchdatabase.com devoted to giving salespeople and companies the tools they need to quickly and efficiently perform their own prospect, company, market, industry and competitor research. “Our goal is to put together a collection of tools that will allow people to do their homework without the time commitment and frustration that has been traditional for salespeople and small companies trying perform research,” McCord said.

The website is currently undergoing heavy construction, according to McCord. “As the site stands, it has tremendous research tools. We have links to hundreds of industry and business associations; hundreds of business and industry publications—most of which are free; tools to research individuals, executives, private and public companies, and industries; we have a tremendous amount of economic, industry, demographic, salary and census data available with just a click of the mouse; you can find current and historic real estate prices throughout the country, as well as real estate taxes and ownership data on most any property in the country; find most any licensed professional in the country; and, of course, find addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. But even with all the tremendous tools we have, we still only have a fraction of the material that will be on the site in the coming months. Most of our tools are free, though there are a few links to companies that charge a small free for some specialized services.”

“Even though we designed the site for salespeople and small companies, we have thousands of users that are finding new uses for our site everyday. We have investors researching investments, recruiters looking for people to recruit, non-profit agencies researching for donors, companies coming to the site for sales and marketing planning research, and that’s only the basic stuff people are using the site for.”

“Monday is always a fun day. The site is growing by leaps and bounds on a weekly basis and will continue in that vein for months to come. We usually upload new material early Monday morning, so on Monday we’ll get a ton of email about the site’s additions, as well as suggestions of what people would like to see us add next -- and we’re always open to suggestions,” McCord added.

In addition to the research tools, the site also has a sales training area that is designed to give salespeople tools that can help them improve their sales business. Like the rest of the site, the sales training area will be undergoing substantial construction and additions over the coming months. “We are currently concentrating on providing research tools geared toward the US, Canada, and the UK. Our next task will be to begin to seriously add tools to the sales training area. As the months go by, we will expand, next to Europe and Asia, then to South America, Africa and the Middle East. Eventually we want to become the world business research and sales training database. This is a huge project that, quite frankly, will never be finished, there will always be new material, new tools to add, new directions to go in.”

McCord stated that one of the issues people have had with the site is that there are so many tools it is hard to know where to go to accomplish certain tasks. Since most of the site’s users are salespeople, professionals and small companies that haven’t done a great deal of research, the site offers a free monthly two hour teleseminar on how to use the site’s tools. “Participation in the teleseminar is very strong,” said McCord. “They fill up rapidly. Right now we don’t keep a waiting list for the next month’s teleseminar, so it really is first come, first serve. We are considering expanding the free teleseminars to weekly, but right now it’s something of a dog fight to get in.”

A major concern McCord has is finding ways to keep the site free. “As the site grows, it becomes more costly. One of our goals is to find some strategic partners who can help us provide more tools for our users and advertisers to help off-set the costs of both developing and managing the site and time and effort required to either build products or find tools already on the net that we can integrate into the site.” He says that the he is in the beginning stages of seeking out partners and advertisers. “The last thing we want to do is to become a subscription service. On the other hand, if we do end up charging somewhere between $5 and $10 a month for a subscription, our subscribers will still be saving hundreds or thousands of dollars a year vs. their alternatives. Even so, our hope is to continue to provide the site free of charge, while still adding to the array of solutions on the site. No doubt, we are by far the best bargain on the internet, and we plan on staying that way—one way or another. Right now we have several thousand users that rely on us to help them increase their business and we plan on seeing that number grow rapidly in the coming months, just as it has during the past few months.”