Meet the Broker: Liz Crowfoot

Today we meet Liz Crowfoot, a list sales executive with Morgan Direct Inc. in Greensboro, NC. One of her specialties is lists involving life sciences.

"But I'm interested in whatever comes my way," she says. "About the only kind of lists I don't work with are financial services."

She joined Morgan Direct in 2004, after working 10 years for PCS Mailing List Co., where she did management and brokerage. Before she got into the list business she was an art director for a newspaper.

About half of Crowfoot's business comes from clients in Europe, while most of her U.S. clients are located in California. She works from home, an arrangement that's becoming more commonplace in the list business, she notes. It's more convenient that way to have telephone conversations with clients crisscrossing time zones.

"There are days when I'm on the phone at 7 a.m. with someone in Europe and then talking with clients in California in the evening," says Crowfoot.

She brokers consumer and business-to-business data, as well as compiled and response files, and deals more with e-mail lists than postal or telemarketing files.

Her brokerage clients include biotech and pharmaceutical companies; universities and seminar marketers; and firms in other sectors. Domestically, Crowfoot recommends lists for Genetic Engineering News, Spectrum Laboratories Inc. and Phenomenex Inc. Outside the U.S., she finds lists for GE Healthcare in Sweden and the United Kingdom.

When she's not perusing data cards, Crowfoot plays piano and reads crime novels for relaxation. She's married and provides a home for nine cats adopted from animal shelters.

Crowfoot also has a keen interest in witchcraft. "I'm writing a novel about witchcraft because I used to live in Salem, MA and I have a friend who's a Wiccan."

What kind of lists are the most difficult to find?

"Phone lists are the toughest for me. You can ask list owners and list managers for phone numbers, but the problem is that maybe only 60% of the phone numbers are good at best—assuming the list is even available," says Crowfoot.

Typically, a high percent of telephone numbers captured from surveys and other sources are wrong or disconnected numbers. Telephone numbers from response lists aren't much better than those from Internet registrations in Crowfoot's opinion.

It's not unusual for as few as 20% of the telephone numbers on a consumer list to be usable, adds Crowfoot. Besides the wrong numbers, many cannot legally be called anyway because they are on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Compiled business-to-business lists are the best sources of telephone numbers for telemarketing, she says.

How has business been lately?

"This month it seems to be picking up. And I've been talking to other brokers who say the same," says Crowfoot.

June and July are normally the slowest months for list brokers and were probably slower than usual this year, because of the economic downturn, she says.

However, companies know it's especially important to send out promotions when business slows because that's how to make more money, which says Crowfoot might explain a recent increase in orders.

Know someone you'd like to suggest for Meet the Broker? E-mailJim.Emerson@Penton.com