You will produce a short checklist you run before any new campaign or list.
Compliance mistakes in prospecting rarely come from people who meant to break a rule. They come from the busy Thursday when a list gets uploaded without a second look, the template that lost its opt-out line during an edit, or the contact who asked to stop but was still sitting in an old spreadsheet. Meaning well catches none of these, but a short checklist run before every send catches most of them.
In this exercise you write that checklist, six to eight plain questions you can run in ten minutes before any new campaign or list, and then run it on your current list. It draws on lesson 5.1, What the Do Not Call Registry covers and how to check it, lesson 5.2, PDPA basics for prospecting: consent, purpose and records, and lesson 5.3, WhatsApp etiquette for first contact. It explains how to apply the rules as this course has described them. For a specific question, ask your compliance team or a lawyer.
Write each item as a yes-or-no question, phrased so that yes means you are fine to go. Questions are easier to run than statements, because you have to answer them.
Start from the four areas the module covered: where the list came from, the Do Not Call check, what each message says, and any rules specific to your work. Here is Mei's checklist as a worked example:
Do I know where every contact on this list came from, and is it recorded in the source field? For each contact, did they give me their details for a purpose that covers this message? Is this a marketing call, text or other message to a Singapore number, and if so, do I hold clear consent or a current registry check for that channel? Is every registry check on this list still inside the validity period on the PDPC website? Have I removed everyone who asked me to stop, from every list and tool I use? Does every message say who I am and how to stop hearing from me? If I plan to use WhatsApp first, did the person give me the number for this purpose or agree to an introduction?
That is seven. Yours may differ. A seller who never calls might drop the voice call wording. A seller who buys lists, against the advice of lesson 2.3, would add a question about how the list provider collected the data and what the people on it agreed to.
If you work in a regulated industry, your employer or regulator may set prospecting rules beyond the PDPA. Financial advisers, insurance representatives, property agents and others often work under codes of conduct and company policies about how they may approach new clients, what they may say and what records they must keep.
Darren's firm has its own compliance manual for prospecting, and it is stricter in places than the general rules. He adds one line to his checklist: "Does this campaign follow my firm's current prospecting policy, and has compliance approved any new template?" He does not try to summarise the manual in the checklist; that one line sends him back to the manual each time.
If you are self-employed in an unregulated field, you can skip this step, but check first whether any professional body you belong to has a code that covers outreach.
Now take your current prospect list and go through the questions in order, one at a time across the whole list, not one contact at a time across all questions. It is faster, and patterns stand out.
Mark every failure. Mei ran her checklist on her list of thirty-six cafe groups, and these were her example results. Nine contacts had no source recorded, mostly names she had copied from an old spreadsheet. Fourteen mobile numbers had never been checked against the registry. Her email template had lost its stop line when she shortened it for the test in lesson 4.4. Two contacts who had told her "not interested, please don't contact me" were still on the list.
None of that was deliberate. All of it would have gone out in her next send.
Fix what failed, then run the failed questions again.
For contacts with no known source, either find out where they came from and record it, or remove them. If you cannot say where a name came from, you cannot say what they agreed to. Mei traced four and removed five.
For numbers that need a check, run it and record the date. For a template missing its stop line, fix the master template so next week's copy is right as well. For stop requests, remove the contacts from every list and tool, then note the request and date in your CRM so they are not re-imported later.
You have six to eight yes-or-no questions on one page, and if your industry has its own rules, one of them points to those. You have run them against your current list, and every failure is either fixed or the contact removed. Mei keeps hers pinned at the top of her prospecting spreadsheet and runs it before every new list and every new template.
The activity below asks you to write your checklist, run it on your current list and fix anything that fails before your next send.
Write a checklist of six to eight questions, run it on your current list, and fix anything that fails before your next send.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).