Bye bye Yellow!

After 12 years, I'm kissing goodbye to our Yellow Pages ad. For a service business a Yellow Pages ad is usually a good investment but I've decided to save 15k by skipping it this year. There's a number of reasons for this;

Lousy Service
A couple of days ago, our rep left a message "your deadline is approaching. Call me back because I'm too busy and won't get time to call you before the books close."

Great service I have to say, but given the way Sensis operate I can barely blame the poor girl.

I subscribe to the Sensis job alerts as I'm always hoping to find a corporate gig suited for a forty something nervous wreck who's been broken by customers.

I've noticed Sensis are constantly advertising for reps. It's not surprising they have to keep advertising given the job pays 58k if you make your targets. That is not good money for a barrel load of stress and a lot of hard work.

But that's a problem for the reps and their bosses. None of that would really matter if I were getting a good return. Sadly, the inquiries we get through the YP these days generally doesn't attract the right customers.

Customer types
In our line of work, the Yellow Pages attracts too many tyre kickers and too many panic merchants.

The panic merchants ignore strange noises and error messages until their computer blows up.

This usually happens at 3am the night before their tax return and their daughter's PHD thesis is due.

This of course wouldn't be so bad if the buggers wanted to pay for emergency service at 3am. But they'll either hang up when you tell them the price or never pay the bill.

Tyre kicking types might not ring at 3am, but they are a bigger waste of time.

A favourite trick of these folk is to make a booking then continue ringing around until they find someone cheaper. They then cancel your booking, often five minutes before the tech arrives.

Category Bloat
I've mentioned previously the Yellow Pages has too many categories. When you have to decide between seven different categories it becomes a gamble. Unless of course you want to spend 100k+ putting for a small ad in all seven.

Of course for some businesses, this is not a problem. Particularly if Sensis give you your ads for free.

The Yellow Pages is our competitor
Why give money to your competitor? Sensis bought their own IT support business, Invizage, a few years back.

Like The Trading Post it's gone nowhere since. But it still rankles me they decided to compete in my field. Even more so when their reps try to steal my customers during their advertising sales pitch.

I also bet Invizage get their quarter page display ads in twenty different categories for a good deal less than the millions of dollars it would cost me.

Price
The price is also a sticking point. It seems to jump every year and has always been my biggest single marketing cost. Although I don't begrudge that if it generates enough leads.

Clunky systems
For a company that claims to be at the forefront of Internet search and online services, their systems are a quaint throw back to the 1950s.

When you call them, you can't do anything until a rep spends some time with you. It seems their idea of selling is to make your head spin with different options.

The problem is small business owners simply don't have the time for this. If they made online ordering available. It would improve their service out of sight, be a cheaper channel and small business owners would jump at it.

They'd probably sell more too. I know plenty of business owners who would go mad optioning up their ads. They certainly do it when they order online with Dell.

Not only would they have lower costs, they'd have a higher sell through rate. They could also use their online service to push extras like Sensis Search and Invizage.

If they had a concept of service, they'd sell more, spend less and probably have fewer double handling and communication stuff ups.

I've always loved their idea of service. Visit their update your listing page. Not only do you have to call them, but the free and paid listing service hours and number are identical.

Good product differentiation there. I'm sure it's never occurred to their senior managers to give paying customers better support than the freebie customers.

It's a shame Yellow Pages can't do with a forty something victim of the IT wars. They might learn something.

But in the meantime, they'll have to do without my modest 15k for this year's ad.

The most influential tech products of the last 25 years

IT Industry association CompTIA celebrated it's 25th anniversary with a survey of the ten most influential IT products of the last 25 years.

I'm wondering who voted for this. The list is bizarre.

My suspicion is whoever they asked confused popularity with influence. That can only explain Internet Explorer being more influential than Netscape Navigator.

Similarly voting Blackberry over Palm (or the Psion or Newton) and voting MS Word over WordPerfect seems odd to me.

The most bizarre thing about the list is they overlooked Microsoft Windows.

One of the things that always worries me about these surveys is we see the press release but we don't see the survey itself, particularly how it was done and who was asked. I'd love to see the raw data for this one.

I'm not sure CompTIA's done itself a favour with this. It's going to antagonise more people in the industry. I guess it will draw attention to them and maybe that's a good thing.