Creating a Database of Prospects

Kip recently hired Tia for a marketing internship. Kip arranged to meet her next Tuesday and explain the major project that she would complete during her internship. The project involves creating a data- base of meeting planners (people who organize large conventions and off-sito mootings). Unfortunately, Kip had to leave on a sudden business trip and would miss the meeting. He wanted to make sure Tia could start working on the project right away. So, he emailed her from the airport to give her the information she needed. His email message, however, was rushed and somewhat confusing.

SUBJECT: Work Schedule

Hi Tia, I was just asked to make a quick business trip to a trade show that will have me gone from the office for the next four days during next week. We had scheduled to meet on Tuesday, at which time I was going to walk you through the process of developing a full, complete, and comprehensive database of meeting planners at state and federal agencies nearby. Since I will be unable to attend our meeting and give you direction, I thought I would give you some ideas so you can get started. I'm currently waiting for a flight at the airport, so I apologize for any typos.

As you know, one of your responsibilities this summer will be to help us develop a database of prospects. What we are looking for, in particular, are meeting planners at state and federal agencies located within 500 miles. We feel that this could be an opportunity if we choose to start developing our capacity to hold green meetings and to include green meetings as part of our core strategic initiatives moving forward. One reason for this is that we think government agencies are more likely to seek out green meetings, and another reason is that, in our past experience, government agencies that hold meetings here are more likely to give us repeat business, thus allowing us to gain more reliable and loyal business.

In order to allow us to act swiftly if we start to market green meetings to government agencies, we want you to create a database that includes information of designated meeting planners in these state and federal agencies located within 500 miles of us that will allow us to send out periodic marketing messages via email, mail, and phone. On top of this contact information, we would like to gather information such as how often they hold meetings, for how many people, etc. We also want to find out the extent to which they have prioritized green (or eco-friendly) meetings in the past. Some of the information is already assembled and organized in our current database that contains all federal and state agencies (this file is located on the intranet). For some of these state and federal governmental agencies, we have some information in the database already that states who the meeting planners are and whether we've met with them in the past, however, this information is mostly incomplete (probably less than 5 to 10 percent complete). We want you to contact all of the agencies to find out as much information as you can. For each meeting planner you talk to, you should ask them what their key criteria are in making their venue selection. Also, please include a field with a rating for how promising the lead is that contains your estimation (or whoever is updating the database) of how likely you think this particular client could be.

As far as the process for making contact with meeting planners, we've generally found that it's best to phone first so that you get in direct contact with a meeting planner and get more accurate and reliable information. You should make a call to find out which person is in charge of meetings. Once you get the contact information for this person (or office), try calling them directly. If your call is not returned within three business days, then make one more direct call. If they do not return the call, then use email to try to arrange information. Of course, it goes without saying, make sure that you are polite as possible so that these meeting planners will want to do business with us in the future.

In the event that you have questions, please give me a call on my mobile phone.

Thanks, Tia, for working on this.

Kip Sent from iPad. Please excuse brevity and typos.

QUESTION

Identify the following and rewrite to make more clear

1. Unnecessarily long sentences
2. Redundancy
3. Empty phrases
4. Wordy prepositional phrases

Rewrite the email and focus on making the message as clear as possible