In the past 75 years, there have been seismic shifts in the way salespeople prospect and sell.
The door-to-door salespeople of the past have traded the giant reverse directories for something much more efficient: access to data that can be used with unprecedented accuracy to connect with the right clients.
Time may change how we sell but one thing remains the same; the importance of making meaningful relationships and delivering value to your customers.
Introducing The Info, the new podcast from Cole Information. We created The Info to help today’s salespeople gain industry insight into how to sell smarter and honor the time-tested sales strategies of the past.
The Info explores the legacy of selling and how through constant innovation, sales leaders can stay ahead of the curve and prospect better with tools that connect them with the right people.
In our premier episode, Cole Information CEO, Jim Eggleston joins VP of Marketing, Bryce Curry for a look at the history of information and sales and how selling has adapted to our data-driven world.
Check out the episode where you get your podcasts and don’t forget to subscribe and comment!
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How to Sell Smarter | Episode 1
Automated Transcript
Bryce Curry:
Imagine how hard selling would be if you didn’t know about your customer. If you didn’t know their name, have an idea of what their budget might be or what mattered to them, your job as a salesperson would be very difficult. Welcome to The Info by Cole Information, a podcast that equips sales leaders to reach the right customers. I’m Bryce Curry, VP of Marketing at Cole Information. In this first episode, I’m joined by our CEO Jim Eggleston to talk about the relationship between information and selling, how it has evolved over the years, and why Cole has been helping salespeople get the right information for over 75 years. And with that, I give you the very first episode of The Info by Cole Information. Jim, thanks for joining me today on the Info Podcast.
Jim Eggleston:
Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here. This is fun.
Bryce Curry:
Jim is our CEO at Cole Information. And how long have you been with Cole?
Jim Eggleston:
Decades. I believe that your normal introduction is, he’s been here decades and decades, but let’s just go with, I’ve been here a while.
Bryce Curry:
So on this episode, I’d like to talk a little bit about the information behind the brand or our company Cole Information. It’s really what drives a lot of what we do. It’s, in a lot of ways, the purpose of what we do and what our customers use our products for. And to do that, I think we have to look in the past a little bit and go back and we’re a unique brand in that Cole’s been around for a while. So Jack Cole founded what is known as Cole Information today was in the forties, late forties?
Jim Eggleston:
1947 is the closest we can determine it.
Bryce Curry:
So we know a little bit, there’s some history that has made its way along and been passed along through different employees over the time. And at that time in Lincoln, Nebraska, Jack saw a need and that need was to be able to have reference information. And that information is used in different ways, has different applications, and they compiled it way before technology existed as we know it. Obviously the internet or anything like that, even computers. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s the need Jack saw and how did he go about fulfilling that need?
Jim Eggleston:
Great question. I actually had the honor of meeting Jack once, oh my gosh, many years ago, 20 years ago. Jack was still alive and came into the office and visited everybody and shared some of his stories about how he got started. And it is the classic success story. He was a young entrepreneur guy. He worked for IBM as a salesman, and as he was out talking to customers about technology, which IBM technology you can imagine in 1947, not like today.
Bryce Curry:
I think it was punch cards, right?
Jim Eggleston:
It was punch cards. Exactly. And he saw a need for information for marketing information for small businesses. How do small businesses, and you got to put yourself in that mindset of 1947, how do you communicate? There aren’t computers, there’s no text, there’s no email. How do you communicate? And a small business salesperson, really their only opportunity was door to door, they’d go into a neighborhood and Jack saw that and he’s like, how can I create a tool for them to use to make them more successful? Was really his original goal.
Bryce Curry:
And that’s so amazing, and it’s something that we think about as stewards of the brand even 70 some years later. And I like to think about when we are innovating or thinking about new products or different strategy to go back to those days of how Jack would’ve looked at it and approached it, because it’s unique to work for a company that’s been around for so long. Obviously we haven’t been around for the 75 years, but one of the key things there is, I think about data compilation back then. This is before computers. And we talked a little bit about punch card, and the way I understand it was is that there was this technology being able to store information on a card based off of these series of punches. And on the visual side of the podcast, we’ll put up some pictures to show some pictures that show some of the historical work that was being done where they were keying in on these punch cards and then the storing of those punch cards on the shelves.
So it’s a really unique legacy that really was a pioneering phase in data compilation all the way back then. So as we think about that foundation and we look forward into the products that we offer today, one of the things that’s still a common theme in everything that we do is the small business owner, the salesperson, the person that is tasked and has the weight on his or her shoulders of having to produce, whether it may be have a living for their family, or for their staff, or they believe in an idea they feel is so good for the community or for their business. They’re looking for something, looking for tools, looking for coaching. They’re looking for different things to help them advance, go from that zero to one. And so I’d like to talk to you a little bit about from your perspective, the way we approach our products and how they help small business, I want to say owners, but also it’s really a sales individual.
Jim Eggleston:
Salespeople.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah. A producer.
Jim Eggleston:
That’s the part that’s the legacy of Jack Cole and the business is that it’s focused not on the data, it’s not focused on necessarily the technology, it’s focused on the user. Because the one thing that hasn’t changed since 1947 is we still have salespeople, and salespeople have products to sell. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real estate agent selling property or an insurance agent but they need to sell a product. And that really hasn’t changed a lot since 1947. You still have people who earn a living, built a career, they’re earning commissions, they’re taking care of their families, and they need tools. Now the tools changed, but the underlying need is the same. So that’s when we think about it and we feel like stewards of the company.
Bryce Curry:
Absolutely.
Jim Eggleston:
It’s got such a legacy, but when we think about stewardship, it’s all about honoring that original premise, which is how do I deliver usable information, actionable information to an individual salesperson in the field? Clearly it was different in 1947. In 1947, it was a printed directory. It’s what was called a reverse directory. It was exactly like a phone book only sequenced and reversed by addresses and house numbers. So it allowed you, when you walked down the street before I knocked on Bryce’s door, I knew who Bryce was, I knew Bryce Curry was there, and they’ve lived in the house for seven years. This is all really valuable information if you’re a salesperson trying to establish a relationship. And so that need hasn’t changed. The way in which we deliver it’s changed dramatically, but the end use is still the same and still the same requirement and still requires a lot of the same data sets, but the delivery method is entirely different.
Bryce Curry:
Absolutely. And the data architecture and the data structure, and ultimately the sourcing of that data is super, super important. And in our industry, there’s a lot of different terms used, big data and different things like that. I’d like to spend just a moment talk about the database that we have, the structure, and it’s still tied to, at the end of the day, it’s used by sales professionals, just like you said, that are looking to know a little bit more about this area that they’re going to go prospect. It’s not necessarily in large campaigns, it’s consumed in smaller ways just like back in the day with the reference directories. When I first started at Cole, I found the reference directories to be really interesting because they reminded me of a set of encyclopedias, and you could have a whole area that was represented on the pages, but in all these little codes, and you had to decode everything.
And it was amazing to talk to people that had used the directory and they could just interpret that code as quickly as, because they were used to using it all the time. And so with those directories coming, one of the unique things about our legacy is that those directories, we, through partnership, found out are being housed at the Library of Congress. And we got an opportunity, a unique opportunity, the two of us.
Jim Eggleston:
We did.
Bryce Curry:
And another gentleman that’s on our staff, Tyler, to go out to Washington DC and experience something that I thought was pretty unique. It allowed us to look back in history of what we’re talking about. It made it real.
Jim Eggleston:
Well, it also, it really validates when you think about it. There are so many today, there are so many pop-up companies, companies you’ve never heard of before. All of a sudden you’ve got a competitor out there offering a product similar to yours, and your customers call you up and say, “Hey, did you hear about ABC Company? What’s all about them?” Well, the unique thing about Cole is that legacy. And as you mentioned, for years and years, the Cole product has been housed in the Library of Congress at the request of Congress to be the official record, if you will, of all the households in the United States. And it serves a really, really useful purpose. It’s not just like so many times you think about libraries as just a static set of books, especially nowadays, you drive by a library and you’re like, okay-
Bryce Curry:
It just sits on a shelf.
Jim Eggleston:
Who goes in there? But the legacy is the history. So in the Library of Congress, that Bryce mentioned in our visit, they have Cole directories for 300 cities across the country every year back to 1947. So you walk through these, a picture like Indiana Jones, these catacombs.
Bryce Curry:
We’re going to have our producer put up a couple pictures.
Jim Eggleston:
Oh, good.
Bryce Curry:
That’ll show just exactly what you’re talking about.
Jim Eggleston:
And so you walk through these library catacombs of shelves down in the basement, and there’s year after year city after city of this legacy of Jack Cole with all the information from those years. And there are people today, in fact, when we were there, people were pulling books off the shelf. There are companies, large reference companies, research companies that research that need to know who lived in this house in 1953. Was this a house in 1953? Was it a gas station in 1953? Was it a dry cleaner in 1953? So those, our directories, the Cole directories are still used today for referencing pre-computer compilation, referencing data about who lived where and when. They use our products in the Library of Congress every day. It was just amazing. Two things about it, really amazing. One, well, being in the Library of Congress.
Bryce Curry:
It’s just a unique building.
Jim Eggleston:
Incredible. But two was that you’ve got a directory on the shelf from 1947, and somebody today in 2023 is coming to the library and pulling that directory off and using it and understanding that’s gospel for-
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, it’s a source of truth. [inaudible 00:11:20] And it’s such a source of truth that it’s being used in like you said, different types of scenarios that can involve some legal matters and also just historical perspective of what used to be in that geo space. It was eye-opening for me because we’d see these carts go by when we were in the basement, and you’d see a couple Cole directories on that cart and a bunch of older books that looked like they were back from the 1800s. And so people were putting in requests for a certain area for that directory. And so that was cool. One of my favorite things though, we have to get into it a little bit, is we actually got to see the staircase that Nicholas Cage went up in National-
Jim Eggleston:
We didn’t just see it. We went up the staircase.
Bryce Curry:
Well, that is true. We did get to experience it and channel our Nicholas Cage voice and mind. I don’t know.
Jim Eggleston:
That’s cool. You think all that stuff in a movie set. And then when the gentleman was taking us up the steps, we both geeked out and said-
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jim Eggleston:
Look at this. This is the steps. This is it.
Bryce Curry:
So that was really cool.
Jim Eggleston:
But nobody was shooting.
Bryce Curry:
No, no.
Jim Eggleston:
At us.
Bryce Curry:
We didn’t have the adventure behind us, but we could in our minds I think we did a little bit. There’s a couple other great stories I think about when I think about the history of Cole, and we talked a lot about Jack Cole and his innovation and taking it that next step and filling a need. Outside of the continuation of that legacy, one of the things that I am always drawn to is the story. And I’d like to just unpack that a little bit with you. When we started moving from realizing the directories had a place, but the market had moved ahead, the need had changed a little bit. Not the purpose, but the need of how to access it changed a little bit.
So one of my favorite stories, I’d love you to tell it because you’ll tell it way better than me, is when you talked with, you were at an insurance conference and got immediate feedback and just like, okay, we’re going to go back. We’re going to make a product and we’ll come back. Would you be up for [inaudible 00:13:23] sharing that? Because it’s what catapulted our business to what it is today, quite frankly.
Jim Eggleston:
It really is. And it’s also, I think it’s helpful to understand it from how we think about technology now.
Bryce Curry:
Absolutely.
Jim Eggleston:
As opposed to data. Tyler and I were at a conference in San Antonio, Farmer’s insurance conference, whatever, 5,000 insurance agents.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah. Big conference.
Jim Eggleston:
And this was, oh my god, I don’t want to date myself, but this is 2000.
Bryce Curry:
Probably about right.
Jim Eggleston:
1998, something like that. And so we’re down there with printed directories, if you can believe it or not. I apologize to everybody.
Bryce Curry:
So you had a little table with directories on it.
Jim Eggleston:
Stop. Yes. We had a little table with directories all over it, and the agents were coming up. They’re like, “Oh yeah, cool directory. I love it, this is great. I use it. I built my business with it.” That kind of thing and great conversations. And then over the course of the couple days, people started saying, “Hey, what about the expiration date of the homeowner’s policy? If I knew when the homeowner’s policy was going to expire, that’d be a great tool because then I’d never knock on a door and have somebody tell me sorry, I just renewed last month.” And so Tyler and I looked at each other and I started saying, “Yeah, that’s under development. We’re working on that.” And so we left the conference and went back to the office and talked about how to create an ex date printed directory. And so we actually did it. We created a city directory sequenced by renewal date of your insurance. And we thought we were-
Bryce Curry:
So same format or same package, just [inaudible 00:14:55].
Jim Eggleston:
Sorted differently.
Bryce Curry:
Makes sense.
Jim Eggleston:
Like Jack Cole, you just sort it different. You say, hey, let’s work our January renewals now and off you go. And so we thought we were pretty top dog. And so we went back to the next conference. So a few months later, we went back to another conference and we got these brand new directories sorted by expiration of homeowner’s policy. And we walked up and people walked up and we showed them, look what we look built. And they’re like, “Oh, that’s really cool. Can I get it online?” And I was like-
Bryce Curry:
What’s this online thing?
Jim Eggleston:
I’m sorry, I have to go home now. I’m an idiot. So we told them, yeah, no, online, it’s under development. Yeah, yeah. We’re almost there. And we scrambled and we built our first online product, Cole ex dates around, I don’t know, 2000, 2001.
Bryce Curry:
2001.
Jim Eggleston:
And we built our first Cole ex dates online product. And luckily it went back and everybody was like, “This is just what we need.” So it was really, the customers, our users, our insurance agents, real estate agents driving us for innovation. Not so much, again, not so much data, but the technology and the delivery. How do we deliver that data in a usable manner? But yeah, no, it’s a funny story and we laugh about it today.
Bryce Curry:
We still bring it up every once in a while because it’s important when you think about product development and progression, it’s just a fun story to talk about.
Jim Eggleston:
It keeps us humble. It takes you back to your roots. You just slap yourself and go, okay, I wasn’t listening. People were telling me this and I was not listening, but I’m listening now. I get it. I understand.
Bryce Curry:
And so nowadays, that legacy that of being a conduit to that information is still alive and it’s actually in several different industries. Let’s talk a little bit about how has Cole differentiated itself in what can be a competitive industry even this many years removed all the way back from the days of Jack Cole, and a couple other city reference directory publishers. Our space continues to be very competitive, even with all the new kinds of different types of prospecting ideas and tools coming out. Let’s talk a little bit about product innovation at Cole and how we continue to progress. And with that core focus still being on the salesperson.
Jim Eggleston:
The products we build are all about what is the task a real estate agent’s trying to accomplish today. And people listening, they know it’s circle prospect. That’s something real estate agents do. They circle prospect around a house that was just sold. They call up the neighbors, they introduce themselves and they say, “Hey, Bryce, have you ever wondered what your house is worth? Your neighbor just sold, he got X dollars for his house. Does that intrigue you a little bit? Have you ever thought about selling your own home?” And they get new listings out of that. So what we do is we just take that action that a real estate agent is doing and we build a product around it, a delivery mechanism. There’s no way a real estate agent or hell, you or I could ever deal with 300 million consumer records. Somebody gave you a pile of records on the desk and go figure it out.
Bryce Curry:
Sort it.
Jim Eggleston:
Yeah, sort it, get started now. It doesn’t work. So everything we build starts with what is our customer trying to accomplish. In this case, circle prospecting. So what we had to do is develop a platform where they could put in an address of a house that was just sold and instantly get 50 or 100 neighbors around it. That’s all. And it seems really ridiculous, as I say it myself, it seems so simple. But for a real estate agent who’s busy with lots of other things, dealing with their clients and dealing with-
Bryce Curry:
Paperwork, transactions.
Jim Eggleston:
Oh my gosh, everything. They can’t deal with that. So we just make it incredibly simple for them to come in, put in a listing address or a house that was sold and get the neighbors of it and reach out to those neighbors, whether it’s by landline, cell phones, emails, whatever contact method they, text, whatever they want to use. But it’s all from that going for. And then other activities, real estate agents, farm neighborhoods. So we created a farming tool that allows them to draw on a map on Google Maps and outline a neighborhood and say give me everybody within that neighborhood. Then you move all the way to predictive analytics that we have data that help them understand when Bryce might be selling his home. People live in their houses seven and a half years on average. So we have all those data sets.
So how do we package that up so they can, instead of talking to 100 people in the neighborhood, they only have to talk to 25, the ones most likely to move? So everything we do when we develop products starts with the customer, the real estate agent in this case, and works backward from the task that they have to do. And I think that’s what resonates is they don’t open our product and think about where do I have to go? They open our product, they log in and they go, okay, I’m going to do circle prospecting today. And we support that.
Bryce Curry:
Absolutely.
Jim Eggleston:
And they don’t have to think about data. They don’t have to think about 300 million records. They just think about, oh, I just need to enter the address of the property that was sold. Done.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, absolutely. It starts with the geo. Just like back in the day with the directories, I’m here in this geographic location and I want to know more about the information so I can be smarter in my prospecting. Having been with Cole now for 15 years and seeing that innovation has really been really cool to see, and Jim at the helm of leading that. And always going back to what we’ve talked about today in looking at the mindset of just what you talked about, what is the end user’s need? In this case, the salesperson, the prospector. Everything we do at Cole, for the most part, we’ve in the past have had some reference services and stuff like that, but is focused on a sales producer that’s charged with making stuff happen, creating deals, not waiting for that phone to ring. It’s outbound marketing and servicing that outreach with quality data that’s still rooted in the mindset that we’ve talked about in this episode today.
That is when we look at a data set, we’re in a unique position where we get to look at a lot of different data sets and that are sourced in a variety of ways. But we try to always, I think, look at that from a lens I would like to think that even started back when they first were starting with Cole and it’s like, hey, our end users are going to be consuming this data at a very micro level. They’re not going to be, like you said earlier, wanting to necessarily ingest a 300 million record database that they’re going to have to figure out the architecture, the server, all that kind of stuff. And have built these conduits to be able to search information in a quick manner that directly impacts their sales and their efforts, saving them time and money and stuff like that.
And it really has, in my opinion, differentiated Cole in a lot of ways and disrupted the industry over the years. Again, looking back on our brand, there’s been various ways that prospectors and sales producers could get access to information. You could call this broker, you could do different things like that. And I think the legacy that Jack started back with those punch cards for those reference directories that were in the hands of door to door salespeople to learn more about the neighborhood before they prospect, I think that legacy, I’d like to think that is still in the fabric of our brand today when we look at things, even when we look at new industries, new target markets and deliverables there.
Jim Eggleston:
No, absolutely. Again, it goes back to the stewardship of the business that Jack started, but it all starts with delivering services that the end user absolutely needs. And doing it in a way they might not have thought about doing it, but it satisfies their need. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters is that we need to make sure that whoever’s using our product is successful in what they’re doing. And that drives innovation for us, and that’s why we attend conferences and events and partner with thought leaders in the industry because we want to be ahead of that curve and understand where they’re headed, how they’re trying to get there, what’s important to them, and how do we update or enhance our product to satisfy those future needs today. And we’re always innovating.
Bryce Curry:
And looking at what steps can we take in the data, because as obviously the population grows as technology changes and all of that kind of stuff impacts how you compile your data and stuff like that. But it’s all very important because at the end of the day, we’re empowering our customers that are focused on sales to be the most efficient and productive in their efforts and their given verticals.
Jim Eggleston:
It’s all about being creative about it. And not only do you have to understand what their need is, but you have to be creative about solving it. We’ve joked many times about how we need a wall of shame.
Bryce Curry:
Oh, sure.
Jim Eggleston:
At work, all of the ideas that we thought were genius and didn’t really resonate with the audience. So we’re glad to have a few wins under our belt as well. You have to be creative. And Jack actually was the most creative guy. Can I tell a story about Jack?
Bryce Curry:
Yeah, please do.
Jim Eggleston:
So Jack, in this business, what you do is on the business side of this business, we acquire data from sources all across the country. There’s no magic repository of data like the Library of Congress has now. That doesn’t exist. So we acquire data from lots of different sources, and Jack did the same thing back in 1947, but when he was first starting out, he didn’t have any money. He was a sales guy trying to make a living. He didn’t have money. So he had a large data set that he was trying to acquire, and it was going to be expensive, and he was going to compile it, and it’s going to cost a lot of money. Money, frankly, Jack didn’t have, so he reached out to a couple of different, I won’t name names, but a couple of different companies in the country here.
And reached out to them and said, “Hey, I’m going to endeavor on this data compilation process. I need a partner. If I do all the work and you split the expense with me, I’ll share the data with you. So I’ll compile the data, you pay me half, and I’ll give you the data and we’ll share the data. We’ll both have it, but you’ll pay half.” And this guy was like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that. I’m in. I’ll split it.” So then he went to another company, company B and said, “Hey, I’m going to compile this data all across the United States, and it’s really expensive. So can we work together? Maybe you pay half and I pay half, and then we’ll share the data.” And the guy was like, “That sounds like a reasonable thing. Let’s do that.” So at the end of the day, he had two partners who paid half each, paid the whole ride, and he shared the data three ways. He got half, he got his share, they got their and off he went. And he got started in business.
Bryce Curry:
Nice.
Jim Eggleston:
By a little bit of living over the edge there.
Bryce Curry:
Well, as entrepreneurs, you have to.
Jim Eggleston:
We don’t do that today. I want to go on the record. That practice stopped a long time ago.
Bryce Curry:
That’s funny.
Jim Eggleston:
Jack Cole, he was a classic. He was a really interesting character.
Bryce Curry:
Yeah. I’m always really intrigued by individuals that, like I said earlier, that go from zero to one. They take that first step and then creating that momentum and fill the need. And he built Cole as a directory business across the country. Obviously certain markets and so forth, but it was a pretty big deal.
Jim Eggleston:
He was involved nationally in politics. He wasn’t a politician, but he had an apartment in Washington DC. He was like a homegrown lobbyist. And so there were a lot of interests in data compilation back then. And think about it, privacy, we don’t deal with any personal identifiable information at Cole but people are concerned about privacy. And they were in 1947. And so he spent time in Congress lobbying congressmen to make sure they didn’t pass regulations or laws that would in some way hamper this business that he’s built. So you think about a guy for, again, being a steward of the company, it’s a lot easier today then. He was worried about Congress doing something that would wipe out his fledgling business, but he was entrepreneurial enough to understand he needed to lobby on his behalf. He needed to speak up. So he would travel to Washington and meet with Congress and not so much persuade them to take action, but to persuade them to not take action. Leave this alone.
Bryce Curry:
Well, that’s definitely important when you carved out a niche in a business and what really became an industry in itself, and it’s an important part of business. And so Jim, thanks for being on today’s episode.
Jim Eggleston:
Absolutely.
Bryce Curry:
And I appreciate your time and taking us through the history of Cole, and it’s so important to us and the way we look at product development and our customers. And one of the rewarding things is to talk to customers that have been empowered to, they said, I’ve earned X amount of commission by doing circle prospecting with your product, and it actually works.
Jim Eggleston:
The success stories are great. Highly motivational.
Bryce Curry:
Absolutely. So for our listeners and those that watch on our platforms, we’re excited for you to see the pictures and bring life to the story that we talked about. And we just wanted a little bit different approach than just stepping back and talking about the history line of our company. We wanted to bring life to Cole Information and what we’re passionate about even in 2023. Thanks everybody. I hope this episode provided value to you as a salesperson. If you enjoyed our content, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. Make sure to join us for the next episode of The Info by Cole Information.
