Companies that are successfully transforming their sales teams to serve a fast changing local and SMB marketplace tend to follow a common set of best practices. These include a focus on customer-driven key performance indicators, a heavy reliance on data to drive all aspects of sales, and sophisticated segmentation to maximize sales effectiveness and manage …

Over the past few months, BIA/Kelsey has been looking at various SMB-focused sales approaches among both traditional media players and digital pure plays. Our objective was to establish a common set of best practices. We discovered early on that the local sales organization that does everything right does not exist, or at least we were …

On last week’s Q2 earnings call, local online marketing firm ReachLocal emphasized how its international expansion will fuel its growth. Plus the company offered a glimpse into its efforts to expand into smaller U.S. markets via telesales.
ReachLocal has long been among the most closely watched companies in the local online/SMB space, and its president, Nathan Hanks, will be …

Business-to-consumer companies have tried to invade the business-to-business space in multiple instances, almost always with disastrous results. The logic for B2C companies is always there: move up the value chain with great big accounts that require no branding efforts. But they don’t work.
What are the secrets of B2B? That’s what our former BIA/Kelsey colleague …

We have been meeting with a number of media salespeople, tracking articles about the transformation of the sales process, developing a number of theories specific to transforming the media sales process plus what is needed to support the transformation. We will be exploring a number of these theories and observations supported by sales rep interviews …

SMB marketing companies have forgotten that local businesses still see calls as a key driver of new business. That’s the opinion expressed by Marchex Executive VP Matthew Berk during today’s session on “Converting Calls to Local Sales.” To succeed in the calls space, Berk emphasized the need to “go deep” and focus on quality. He …

 
Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle, made news at ILM West this afternoon, announcing a three-year deal with Canada’s Rogers Communicationsduring a 15-minute Q&A with BIA/Kelsey analyst Bobbi Loy Luster. Rogers is a leading communications company in Canada. Its deal to use Yodle’s technology and services to sell online media solutions bundles to Canadian SMBs is …

The purchase funnel that takes consumers from awareness to transaction and retention has been an article of faith among marketers for many years. TV advertising, for instance, is “upper funnel.” Yellow Pages, at the point of sales consideration, has been “lower funnel.”
Google has other ideas. Any purchase consideration must now consider the impact of search …

We’ve been starting to see the signs of recovery for the past few months. Companies that have been cutting costs and back office expenses are now realizing they need to get the sales end of their businesses moving again. Throughout the recession, salespeople who could at one time demand higher base salaries, fringe benefits, signing …

The Groupon deal-a-day model — “no money upfront, but we’ll take up to 50 percent of the coupon value” — has been met with high satisfaction. Groupon’s internal data show that 97 percent of participating SMBs want to do it again.
But the model has been taking real heat this week from some SMBs on the …

We had the opportunity to sit down with industry leader MediaTrust to understand the major changes in the in the performance marketing (pay-for-results) category and the challenges of developing a cost-per-lead (CPL) model.
MediaTrust began as an affiliate marketing company, but was continually challenged by the deceptive practices of many affiliate marketers and publishers. Understanding …

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 …

I like the “For Dummies” series a lot — more than 1,700 different Dummies books have been published since 1991. But it never occurred to me that there could be a volume geared toward local online advertising. It occurred to Yodle CEO Court Cunningham, who has now co-authored “Local Online Advertising for Dummies” with business …

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, celebrating its 15th anniversary, is holding its annual leadership meeting at La Costa in Carlsbad, California. The sold-out meeting, dubbed “Ecosystem 2.0,” has attracted 650 attendees, up 30 percent from last year: a further omen of recovery in the economy. Over the years, we have actively helped IAB develop its leadership …

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 …

Are the small-business “home and trade service” advertisers that populate PennySaver and American Classifieds a good bet to buy search packages? That’s the question being posed by American Classifieds, the second-largest classified publisher franchise with 6,000 editions.
The company signed this summer with WebVisible to provide search tools and sales training for 600 sales reps. WebVisible …

At J.D. Power and Associates’ Automotive Internet Roundtable in Las Vegas this week, several speakers said they believe mobile search and services are an increasingly important part of auto marketing — assertions backed up by J.D. Power research showing that 18 percent of auto shoppers use mobile during the car buying process, up from 15 …

Real estate advertising revenues will give way to transaction revenues, at least in SoCal, as the Los Angeles Times Media Group teams with several partners to launch Zetabid, a new site that will display and auction foreclosed homes and other properties. The other partners are London-based GoIndustry-DoveBid, an auction specialist, and CataList Homes of Hermosa …

The Wall Street Journal today wrote about the challenges that newspapers have in trying to sell to small local businesses. Beth Lawton at the Newspaper Association of America kindly asked us to add some context to the article (subscription required). Here is our piece.
… As The Wall Street Journal article highlights, many newspapers are looking “downscale” …

The economy isn’t doing too well, but that hasn’t hurt the hiring picture for Yellow Pages and local search sales pros, according to YP veteran Ken Clark, who put out an interesting promo for his recruitment firm, Hawthorne Executive Search.
Clark says hiring via Hawthorne is up 25 percent in 2008. Publishers continue to expand in …