vSplash‘s Board Advisor and former BIA/Kelsey executive Neal Polachek briefed BIA/Kelsey on some recent milestones achieved by vSplash with their sales engagement tool – BuzzBoard. Launched by vSplash the BuzzBoard sales tool has gained significant market adoption since Charles Laughlin wrote about it here.

BuzzBoard’s technology currently crawls and analyzes over a hundred parameters against over 44 million businesses with websites in over 50 countries. BuzzBoard is designed around two guiding principals – enabling sales representatives to be more efficient as they prepare for calls – either in person or on the phone – and more effective when they are engaging with the customer or prospect. The tool’s intuitive capabilities range from building audits or – health checks – on the merchant’s digital presence, to scoping out the competition and then to generating proposals based on the competitive analysis.

The BuzzBoard Audit Report evaluates the merchant’s digital Presence (Search Engine Indexing, Social Media, Mobile Website, Local Business, Pay Per Click) and Performance (Local Analysis, SEO, Infrastructure Robustness, Keyword, SMO and Reputation). The Audit Score is a summary estimate of digital readiness. For example, we did a live analysis of Paisano’s local pizza shop near BIA/Kelsey headquarters office in Chantilly, Va. Paisano’s, who received a 79% score, was actually quite good according to Polachek.

We have come to learn that there are many interesting mobile sales tools and apps emerging in the marketplace. Many of these sound good on paper and look good in a slide deck, but how is Buzzboard actually performing? BuzzBoard’s user base has grown dramatically since Charles’s earlier post and now hovers near 1,500 across over 35 media companies and in 53 top U.S. markets. Included among the 35 companies are some key local media brands such as Hearst, Advance, Digital First Media and Tribune. According to vSplash, “BuzzBoard’s largest partners are seeing ROI multiples well in excess of 25x and some data suggests the ROI is even north of 50x” for some. Accompanied with strong sales leadership, this tool has the capability to enable local media companies to sell incrementally more digital products to merchants in the U.S and around the world.

To see an earlier blog on Buzzboard, jump over to Charles Laughlin’s post on vSplash Making Inroads with Newspapers.

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Digital media services provider vSplash has made inroads with both newspaper and directory/local search organizations with its BuzzBoard sales productivity tool. vSplash is widely known for its website production capabilities, as well as its voluminous data on small-business digital presence, which is marketed (in partnership with BIA/Kelsey) as SMB DigitalScape.

Today vSplash announced deals with the Dallas Morning News and Dubai’s Local Media, which publishes print and digital search products in the Middle East. Both companies have signed on to use BuzzBoard as way to boost sales productivity.

The basic idea behind BuzzBoard is to reduce the amount of prep time sales reps engage in, thus freeing more time for actual selling, hence generating more revenue. Last year, BIA/Kelsey conducted an online survey of local media sales reps, which showed that on average, reps spend less than 30 percent of their time actually selling. The rest of their time  is spent on paperwork, sales prep, training, travel between sales calls and other tasks. BIA/Kelsey is currently running a second wave of its online sales survey, and results should be ready in time for our Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing event, Sept. 11-13 in Austin, Texas.

The data that supports SMB DigitalScape also help make BuzzBoard a powerful sales prospecting and prepping tool. The tool provides automated prospecting, customer and competitive intelligence, which saves the rep timing chasing down this information. The tool also automatically generates sales proposals, and voice records interactions with merchants, which saves time taking and recording notes from sales meetings.

“The data behind the BuzzBoard app is what makes it such an effective tool for opening doors and closing sales,” said D. Brian Ritenour, General Manager, Digital Sales at 508 Digital, The Dallas Morning News. “BuzzBoard not only saves our sales reps hours of time in pre-sales prospect research, it provides the credibility that gives our reps and our customers confidence in the solutions we propose.”

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Yellow Medya, Turkey’s Yellow Pages publisher, announced this week the release of its Brand SoLoMo location-based engagement platform. It allows brand owners to geo-code every point of sale, whether physical or virtual. In addition, it maintains a point of sale inventory database that is deployed to whichever social, local and mobile platforms the brand owner chooses. From a single destination, the brand owner can access both statistical data and perform content management.

Yellow Medya has also partnered with vSplash Tech labs to fulfill what the directory publisher projects to be thousands of online and mobile brand points of presence. Last month, Yellow Medya had more than 720,000 businesses listed in 600 categories. Its current content and syndication partners include Google, Foursquare, TomTom, TripAdvisor and Yandex.

Trevor Nadeau, managing director of Yellow Medya, will speak at the Search Starts Here event, which we are co-producing with the Local Search Association.

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