I recently attended a webinar hosted by SalesBlogcast that featured social media company BizBrag. My reason for attending was to learn how small and medium sized-businesses can take advantage of social media. Based on our Local Commerce Monitor research, 32 percent of SMBs said they plan to use a social site, while 31 percent indicated …

For the past year and a half, we have been answering questions about and consulting with our clients on sales transformation and consultative selling (see here, here and here). One of the key aspects of many of the questions we receive is “what has fundamentally changed, how has it changed and what do we need …

One of the recommendations we have been supporting and talking about over the past year is the need to look at the print directory differently. For the past 100-plus years, the directory has been viewed as a distribution media vehicle — “we deliver to every resident in a city.” In recent years, with distribution declining …

One of the last sessions at Marketplaces 2010 focused on what local niche or media sites can do to better leverage opportunities to grow revenues. Sitting on the panel were Tony Lee of Adicio, Ken Kalb from Analog Analytics and Reed Brown from Matchbin, who all had similar views on how to help local media …

Citsearch CEO Jay Herratti, speaking at BIA/Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference, debuted the company’s new thinking and approach to how best to address the local online market. Herratti explains, “It has been increasingly difficult to reach consumers and advertisers at scale. This is the toughest challenge because there is increased competition from a variety of local search …

I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Pastko, CEO of Coupious a Boulder, Colorado-based mobile coupon platform. Coupious got its start when Pastko and his partner leveraged their experience at Purdue University to launch a Coupious iPhone application in Lafayette, Indiana. While the duo did very little marketing, word-of-mouth marketing helped push their mobile …

I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it is dedicated to linking online and offline conversion so clients can better understand what leads …

Having been in the trenches for the past year talking about multiproduct selling and how a consultative or collaborative sales process is a key component for selling multiple media, I keep hearing over and over again “I’ve been training on consultative selling for years so why should we rely on it to take us into …

Mapping has become less about radius of where you are and more about what people define as local, how far people are willing to travel and the importance of certain events or locations in their community. While the advertising paradigm has focused on ZIP codes/postal codes, consumers identify more with neighborhoods or specific areas of …

Neil Budde of DailyMe and Mike Orren of Pegasus News helped the ILM:09 audience understand what it takes to offer a truly customized news offering that is engaging and relevant.
One of the key takeaways both Orren and Budde discussed was the idea that not everything can or should be customized on the news site. …

Discovery is the most important step of the sales process since it is when the customer gives the salesperson a roadmap that helps him or her clearly understand the best products to present. Rather than being overwhelmed by the number of products in the portfolio, a good discovery process makes selection a more straightforward task. Discovery also …

One of the often asked questions we receive regarding sales from all local media sectors is whether multiproduct selling by a single sales force is really possible. The natural follow-on question invariably is, what would be the benefit of a single sales force as opposed to specialized sales teams for each product area — traditional …

I recently had a chance to talk with Marco Zappacosta, founder and CEO of Thumbtack, a newly launched online resource for trusted local businesses. Thumbtack facilitates an online marketplace for local services by offering consumers one place to easily find, compare and purchase local services, while also giving service providers verifiable reputation, transaction support, appointment …

I participated in a webinar sponsored by DataXu discussing how the development of display ad exchanges will make real-time bidding for display ad units and impressions similar to the current SEM process by making it more open, targeted and technology driven. I attended the webinar because of the increasing interest of local media publishers in …

The traditional print directory has been under fire over the past few years, but panelists at DMS ’09 feel there is new life in the print book as it moves from its stagnant 1.0 version to become more usable and consumer focused. It’s important to point out that while the perception remains that directories are …

 
The local media marketplace continues its rocky road through the current economy, but many companies are bullish on their futures given the moves they have made in diversifying their product portfolios with new digital offerings to balance their core media products. 
In order to maintain leadership positions in the small and medium-sized business marketplace, the key …

The recent battle between Burger King and its franchisees on the reallocation of local media dollars to its national brand advertising indicates a wider battle between franchisees and their corporate owners.
MediaPost writer Dave Morgan points out:
“We’re in a severe recession. Everyone is being asked to do more with less, and it’s natural to expect business …

As the Kelsey Group has been studying the sales approach in the local media space, what has struck me is the lack of innovation on the part of the Yellow Pages. In the past, the Yellow Pages sales force has been viewed as a competitive advantage because of its size and depth of existing clients. …

Oodle CEO Craig Donato led off day three of Marketplaces 2009 describing how classified advertising has gone through an evolution over the past five years, progressing from simply importing them online, to making them searchable and finally today integrating classifieds with social media/user-generated content (UGC). Donato pointed out that while newspapers led the way in …

The phone is quickly advancing as a means of pushing out ad-sponsored content that mimics some of the popular mobile advertising features.
Greg Webster of VoodooVox, at ILM:08, debuted some of the new features of the company’s In-Call Media group, demonstrating additional marketing opportunities via on-hold messages, “pre-call” messages when using calling cards, and distribution over …