After ages, today I saw someone refer to the good old telephone directory to find the contact details for a phone company and it had me pondering what it would be like if we still had to use that to locate business contacts for b2b marketing campaigns. The only reason he was using the directory was because the internet connection was down and he couldn’t check google to find a customer care number. 

If finding that wasn’t painful enough, I started thinking about how using a company database like active contacts to find your decision makers would have been different from using ‘Ye ol’ telephone directory’ and although I dont know how useful this may be, here is why we dont use them anymore:

•  Searching for a company or a person in a telephone directory is a pain and thats putting it mildly
• If an online database is the model of mobility where you can access data from anywhere, a telephone directory is the opposite. Dont believe it? Try carrying one around while traveling.
• Telephone and business directories gave you a name and a phone number and at the most an address. Thats very little information if you compare it to the likes of Activecontacts.net, Hoovers.com, InfoUSA.com and other databases.
• Telephone business directories can’t integrate with your salesforce.com CRM or be downloaded into a csv format to use with your campaign management software.