The final goodbye to Yellow Pages

I was wakened out of my massive head cold recovery by a call from our Sensis rep. Despite what she said previously, she did call back to try and get me to see the light of renewing our Yellow Pages advert.

In our conversation, she mentioned another Sensis product, Clickmanager. A look at their website indicates this is part of their Bidsmart program.

It seems to me Sensis are playing catch up in this market, like their search engine they are behind Google on this product.

This wouldn't be so much a problem if Sensis were leveraging these products using their existing sales channels, but once again they have a separate set of salespeople to deal with them.

If they had an online console system they'd be able to offer these services directly. I'm also amazed the sales lady didn't mention these earlier.

The sad thing for Sensis is they have a massive range of products, many of which are attractive to small business. They seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for small businesses to learn about them, let alone buy them.

You can't help but think that unless Sensis can snap out of this mentality, then it's doomed to a slow decline as Internet searches improve and the paper directories decline.

I've said previously that Telstra need to sell Sensis. The more I look at it, the more I think this is the only way for Sensis to survive in the long run.