Yellow Pages sales forces are greatly aided if they have comprehensive profiles of businesses ready to go. This can now be accomplished by Web crawling for company info, trademarks, logos, articles, management bios and other content, said 3L System Group CEO Joakim Richter during his keynote at The Kelsey Group’s DMS ’08 conference. “It is pushed to the screen prior to the sales call,” he said.

3L’s crawling is now being used by Eniro in its native Scandinavia, Local Insight Media in the United States, and other YP publishers in Europe and Asia. Richter says the “pre-generated” info is a vital component of a package that includes Web site development and other features.

“Five years ago, content for the Yellow Pages industry was equal to contact info. But that’s not enough to start selling online today,” said Richter. “The online marketplace demands publishers to be more content driven.”

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