Intuiton Tool: Check Out The Customer's Neighborhood With A9

Amazon's A9 search engine has added an interesting feature to it's yellow pages function. In the top ten cities Amazon has photographed every city block. A search for a business in any of these cities now includes a picture of their location.

If you are like me the first thing I do when learning a customer's address is to drop that address into a search engine to learn who else is located at that same address. Knowing what other businesses share a building might be a good way to prompt a customer to refer you to them. "Do you know anybody across the hall at xyz corp?"

This application, while not entirely accurate at times, provides useful information about a customer's neighborhood. Planning to meet with a new customer? Why not suggest that you meet in that coffee shop you saw three doors down from their building.

On a darker note this service can also help you discover when a customer or prospect is using a PO box service or false address. Useful stuff.

try it here (click on yellow pages upper left)

[read USA Today story]