Yellowbook Positioning Failure
One of the interesting things about running my own business and actually having a physical office presence is having people come in and try to sell me things, most of them do not make it past my operations guy extraordinaire who does a great job of filtering people asking for something. Recently we had 2 different "Yellowpage" companies coming through on successive days. Although one of them figured out pretty quick what we did as a company and did not work to hard to sell us the Yellowbook people actually scheduled a time to come back. I actually thought this would be an interesting conversation to see how they positioned their product and how they were dealing with the rapid decline of usage of the print yellowpage phonebooks.
As most domain investors know local search is a very fast growing sector of search engine usage. It is pretty obvious that a good portion of the people using local search either through their PC/laptop or mobile phones are the same people no longer using their print phone books. Knowing all this I was truly interested to hear how the sales people from an industry with their current challenges would position around this.
After getting over the initial laughing at the fact I am basically a competitor in some facets, they started to discuss their story. One of the first things I noticed was the conflicting story they were giving. Basically they were telling me the print side was not dying but in the next sentence they would talk about how they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars marketing their web based directory and services. As a buyer the first thing that I would be concerned about, even if I was not in this industry, is that you are trying to get me to spend the majority of my dollars with you on a product that you are not promoting yourselves.
The next thing, after getting to know the people a bit better is learning that the "junior" person in the room was actually the person that knows "new media" and is their to support the "senior" person. In otherwords they have figured out that customers are getting more savvy about their online marketing spend and social networking usage and they have a "sales engineer" type person to help support the legacy account managers (can I say old school account managers). From talking to them this is a fairly new model for them. I think its great for them that they get the shift but when they are spending 80 percent of their time focused on selling the old school print phonebook ad and then telling me they have invested in resources (people) and marketing to drive their online business it tells me they still do not quite have it right.
Now, I must say I do have a bit of history and even before starting an online media company I was more than a little bias against print Yellowpage/Yellowbook delivery. I had worked with the people at Big River Telephone in the past as they helped their President's son launch YellowPagesGoesGreen.org. The site focused on allowing people to submit their information so that they no longer received the print Yellowpages from their area, local edition or the big players. I had helped them with their grassroots marketing efforts and was pleased when after less than a year the site had 147,000 sign ups and had been featured in Readers Digest, LifeHacker.com, along with many others. Oh yeah all with NO paid advertising.
A last little side note to the story, I recently heard from 2 different customer prospects that the one of the local yellowbook sales people are telling them that Missouri.me is advertising in yellowbook to get all their traffic. Well, that is funny for a couple reasons 1) We have spent zero dollars with either major Yellowpage company and 2) Are they that afraid that a new company in the area could hurt them that they have to try to bash us.
In reality they have an online ad package that would be interesting to us. Is it wrong to advertise your business even if you are in advertising. Hmmmm. I am pretty sure they talked about spending hundreds of million advertising their online presence. I did call the online media specialist on the their team and called them out on it. He was to do some "research" and I look forward to hearing what he comes back with. I guess its a compliment, looks like they are paying attention to a new upstart in the area.
