Meet the Broker: Carol Arnold

Today we meet Carol Arnold, vice president of sales and marketing at ListAbility Inc., a company she started in May 2008 with partners Chris and Shelli Dyer.

The company works with both business-to-business and consumer lists, as well as other brokers and agencies, printers and mail houses.

“We work hard to find the right data vendor and then take the time to learn the databases so we know their strengths and weaknesses,” she says. “That way we can help our clients deliver highly responsive lists for their mailers.

Before forming ListAbility, she had worked at the former Data Products USA since 2003, starting as “a pretty green broker,” eventually moving up to product leader for online offers.

“They decided to cease business and operations and they gave me the opportunity to take over some of the contracts,” she says. “I called around to a couple of my former clients and Chris and Shelli and I started ListAbility.”

DataProducts USA was her first experience in the list business. Previously, she was involved with things like selling computer applications for specific industries like natural gas pipelines.

How did she end up in list brokerage? Part of it came out of her passion for sailing.

“I had the opportunity to join Data Products through some people I knew from sailboat racing,” she says “The owner of the company had a sailboat and the managing partner was doing a lot with sail boating as well as the list company.”

Since she started in the business, she’s seen technological development as the most profound change.

“I’d say that everyone has better access to some of the user-friendly online systems for both list research with list acquisition,” she says.

This stands in contrast to her days at DataProducts USA when much of her job consisted of making lots of phone calls, she notes.

But there are two sides to this. “The speed of technology is one of the things which has made it easier but it’s also opened up the market to more players,” she says.

Off the job, Arnold lives with her husband in Norwell, MA and enjoys sailing and power boating. “And it’s coming up on ski season so we’ll be heading up to New Hampshire,” she says.