The Directory Game
The Superpages project was a huge success and our team won the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Excellence in 1994.
Print Publishers, magazines, newspapers and local circulars, all know their life blood comes from paid advertisers. Directories know this more than others and therefore provide a more intense training for their sales representatives. The reason GTE Directories was so competitive and delivered such a quality product, was because they provided impeccable training for their sales representatives.
With GTE Directory’s intensive training I not only lead.my office in sales for three straight years, I understood what it took to make money in the print game.
Upward mobility was based on sales performance and production unless you were Black. This was my conclusion after leading the indoor sales department in both sales performance and production, I was never promoted to the higher commission in outside sales, as explained to me by my supervisor, was because the departments sales numbers would drop below company standards.
But that wasn’t the take away here. Because I knew I could take my sales skills to our competitors or succeed as a sales consultant in the crowded directory publishing field at that time. I was even prepared to take my accounts where ever I landed.
During my tenure with GTE Directories I was a part of a major and bold corporate shift from printed directories to digital directories. The take away from GTE Directories was the opportunity and experience of being on the Superpages Development Team. I lead the initiative on developing 17,000 headings and sub-heading categories for the national online directory that listed over 11 million businesses. The headings and sub-headings were ingested into the Information Retrieval System (IRS), which was the predecessor to what we now know as a search engines.
The Superpages project was a huge success and our team won the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Excellence in 1994. Once Superpages was fully implemented, GTE was able to reduce 33 million tons of paper usage.
Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) were the predecessors to Search engines. IRS are software systems that are designed to retrieve and rank information from a collection of documents based on a user's query. They were originally developed in the 1950s to help researchers find information in large collections of scientific papers.
Black Business Directories across the nation never really got it. They basically were little more than a guide that listed local businesses and some featured sporadic display advertisement. I have never seen a Black Business Directory with actual advertising products that generated revenue. Most simply charged about $25 to be listed.
When I would point that out most publishers didn’t value the information enough to make the changes necessary to increase their revenue streams. Most didn’t have a sales team and were largely one man operations.
Upon leaving GTE Directories, I did a short stint with PacBell Directories before I decided to become a consultant for publishers of Black Business Directories. While that decision wasn’t one of my most prosperous endeavors, it did get the attention of both Muhammad Nasserdine (founder of Recycling Black Dollars) and Harold Hambrick (Executive Director of the The Los Angeles Black Business and Trade Show). They both embraced the idea of having value-added products and the use of technology to advance their missions.
Today, I offer directory publishers a turn-key solution and platform that gives them everything they need to help businesses listed in their directories the ability to get more value-added products, new leads and more sales.
