Traditional sales vs. a dedicated staff

[Jason Holmes]

The age old question:

Are you selling with your traditional staff or with a new Internet sales staff. A combination of both? Telemarketing?

For the consultants and researchers, what are you seeing as a trend and what's been the most successfull?

Interested in hearing your comments.

[Curt Arnold]

We have our own dedicated online sales staff (4) that sell 99% of online. Print and Phone Room can sell online but don't. I plan to pursue getting print more involved this year plus a training program for them as well. We'll see what the response is.

[Ed Bourn]

We have a dedicated online sales staff of three (3). One Retail, one employment, and one auto/real estate. Same as below, we have a few people bring it up - mainly in the classified verticals, but the retail staff really struggles. The AD is looking to get at least one $5K sale per rep this year, which is a great initiative. A ground-up online training is going to start in a few weeks. Merging a Gannett course with one from the Miami Herald that they shared at the NAA Online Sales conference in Chicago back in September. I would not be surprised that in 3 years, we don't have online-dedicated reps - just reps selling the suite of products. There's a handful of newspapers that seem to be doing it successfully.