Qype pushing their local offering
There we go. Qype is now looking for sales people to tout their Premium Listings. All of this is bound to happen via the phone at the moment because sending people around germany, france and the uk to sell those listings is a serious undertaking that even their venture funding will probably not allow. But it will be interesting to watch how Qype fares with selling those premium listings, going against things like Gelbe Seiten (Yellow Pages) and others, that already have huge sales forces. Especially with Klicktel just pushing into the same market and starting a real sales forces, this will be difficult. They probably do have some other methods up their sleeves and going to a shop saying that there are already some good ratings, is of course something that makes for an easier sell.
What this really shows is that the local market is not really won over yet by anybody. We are going really strong at Ormigo in some niches and have some extremely promising signups of other service providers that would like to get new customers (like moving a bee colony ;)). Of course we only sell people with an interest to buy, not a listing, and that turns the problem around in the sense that people buy performance. This performance is not always measurable but it is really what such a listing should bring, how ever it is measured. Possibly coupons are another idea.
But we built it ourselves, just having the knowledge in the team.
