Yellowbook.com: Our nine keys to successful conversion to integrated sales

A second home page promotion shows days left in the contest.

Move over Yelp. A home page contest with a dramatic offer encourages reviews.

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Yellow page directory companies got a head-start on other media in transforming their companies to interactive media. In particular, YellowBook.com doubled online sales to $400 million in 2010. At the 2009 Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising conference, Patrick Marshall, Chief New Media officer, gave nine  keys to their success.

1. Convert the entire sales force to integrated print/online sales. With hundreds of sales people, “starting over” by building a separate sales force of online only representatives was never an option.

2. Support the sales force with automated tools. “As the product portfolio becomes more complicated it becomes necessary to let the computer do the thinking and let the sales force concentrate the relationship with the merchant.” Yellowbook.com invested in technology that bundles campaigns based on criteria input from the client.

3. Sell leads instead of products. “At the end of the day the customer is not buying advertising from us; they are buying leads from us and they do not care what media they are in as long as the leads are at an acceptable cost.”   Yellow pages are searched based products, and yellowbook.com executives understand their business has always been leads not branding.

4. Bundle a variety of products.   Packages include SEM from reseller relationships with Yahoo, Google and Bing, direct mail, and web site creation. All bundles are designed to boost leads.

5. Follow the mantra “Leads for Less.” Yellow pages companies sell a product at the end of the sales funnel; understanding clearly where the product is in the value chain is critical.

6. Understand and leverage existing assets. Sophisticated information technology infrastructure, deep financial resources for technology investment that creates “barrier to entry” issues for potential competitors, legacy “feet on the street “ sales force, deep experience of senior management, huge customer base.

7. Roll-out better lead-generating products. By end of march Yellowbook.com will have 50,000 merchant videos, which increase telephone response rates by 50 to 500%.

8. Understand and value smaller incremental revenues. “Online sales are so profitable because the sales cost is paid for by the core product, ie the margin is more profitable than the dollars before.” He also pointed out that print book sales decline is flattening out and companies are already re-sized.

9. Switch from all annual sales to an interactive model.  New products and contracts  include a schedule of upsells to other products later in the year.

March said Yellowbook.com considers AT&T to be its top competitor, followed by Google. Ironically, Google is also largest the largest referral source for Yellowbook.com. The second largest is Facebook.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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