Berry Pens Deals With Yodle, Web.com

The Berry Co. announced today new alliances with Yodle and Web.com that will add to the portfolio of online product and services Berry will offer its small-business customers. The deals are part of a new branded offering called Berry Leads that the company will roll out market by market in 2010.

The deals fit into Berry’s broader strategy of becoming less print centric and more about selling a wide array of local media solutions, supported by performance measurement. To achieve this, Berry is collecting a growing list of partners to deliver components of this strategy, Yodle and Web.com being the latest two. Berry already resells Yellowpages.com and Google, and it has formed a deep partnership with 3L Systems and Salesforce.com to create the systems to enable the company to sell and provision media across multiple products and platforms.

“Our goal is to ensure that our small and medium-sized business clients are generating local leads from the multiple sources and platforms that today’s consumers use,” said Scott Pomeroy, president and CEO of Berry, in the announcement today. “We believe that Web.com and Yodle will bring best-in-class products, fulfillment and digital expertise to our clients, complementing our client-focused approach.”

A year ago, we talked with Yodle after it raised a US$10 million round. At that time, the company reported 5,000 advertisers and 250 employees. Yodle, like rival ReachLocal (which recently filed for an IPO), deploys a direct sales force.

As we learned recently, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein is open to the idea of companies like ReachLocal reselling its inventory. The Berry-Yodle deal has Berry reselling Yodle’s products. However, we wonder if the Berry-Yodle deal couldn’t be a two-way street, given Yodle’s direct contact with SMBs?