HereForTheBeer: Whenever some potential customer is dumb, er, curious enough to look me up on Dun & Bradstreet, I get a call from D&B about a week later. "Your business credit report is incomplete, which is costing you business!" Yes, it's "incomplete", and no, it's not costing me business.
So they want me to pay something like $349 in order to fill out my business credit history. If I don't, they simply list it as incomplete, which puts it at some arbitrary lower rating. What the deal is, they charge the vendor money to complete the 'report', and then they charge the other guy to be able to look at the report - whether it's complete or not. So they KNOW it's not accurate, and still charge the customer to see it. Supposedly there's a free way to update your data. I tried it a couple times before I realized it's all bullshit. That part of the website didn't work, anyway. Go figure.
Yeah, go screw yourselves, D&B.
The other one I get is one that goes straight to VM every time - not sure how that works, but there you go. "Hi, this is Rachel. Just following up on that $250,000 business line of credit we talked about [we never talked about anything like that]. Give me a call at [some toll free number that doesn't match the local-ish call number] to discuss..." Sometimes it's "Todd", but usually "Rachel". It's actually done pretty well - the callers do make it sound like we've spoken before. Good for a larf, and at least they're not interrupting me with a call.
It takes alot of balls and brains to start a business in the US. You'd think they'd know better: if you're not the boss, you're not someone in a position to finish the profile.