Obviously the Internet can be a rich source of contact information for sales professionals. Sometimes it can be too rich. Imagine calling on medical professionals in a large city, and finding the online yellow pages listing every doctor, dentist, surgeon, clinic, and more.

You can turn web page listings into useable contacts in your Desktop Sales Manager sales pipeline using contact information screen grabbers. These programs can do an incredible job of capturing the name/company/address/phone type contact information from web pages and converting it into a data file that imports nicely into Desktop Sales Manager, ACT, Salesforce, etc. An example is eGrabber, but there are LOTS of these type of programs. They are often an in-memory utility that is ready to grab contact information as comes across your web browser.

If you haven't signed up for one of the networking services like Linked In yet, then it is well worth considering. Friendster, Orkut (google) are other flavors of the same idea. All are basically free, with upgrades for a modest cost.

As a sales professional these networks offer an incredible opportunity to contact and build electronic relationships.

Here is a simple example. Suppose I am a sales rep in Austin, Texas and I am interested in calling on National Instruments, but don't have any contacts beyond the executive listings I find on the website and in SEC filings. A simple query at Linked In shows me 20 names of current and past employees who have filled a variety of different roles. I can reach out to any of them through Linked In's email introduction service.