He opens the piece as follows:

What made newspapers viable for so long was the fact that they had two products/businesses that were largely unrelated but bundled together. There was the news business — monetized by display ads — and the classifieds business — monetized by classified ads. The classified business was enabled by the distribution and audience of the news franchise.

He also highlights that most local salesforces aren’t the asset they were once thought of…

Having gotten closer to “the last mile” of the Internet, I’ve come to observe that in most situations the local sales organizations of the incumbent media are more encumbrance than asset.

He wraps up his piece as follows:

The sooner local media recognize dual business models — rather than dueling business models — the sooner we’ll see hiring rather than firing being the storyline of local media.

Related articles:

• 5 Fatal Flaws Killing Local Internet Plays
• Ten Point Plan to Re(Building) a Successful Local Media Salesforce

In the post, he goes into detail on each of the 5 fatal flaws listed below:

1. Farming Hunters.
2. Expensive sales people and processes for low dollar advertisers
3. Inability to quantify the value of your audience and articulate a return-on-investment to a prospect.
4. Cluttered sites with postage stamp sized ads
5. Rate card as after thought vs. a strategic selling tool

This week another Altus Alliance client had a successful exit that was reported on Forbes.com. The following is an excerpt from the beginning of the article.

Media Recovery, a leading Datacenter products and services company, has acquired ISSI Data (www.issidata.com), a privately held company headquartered in the Seattle, Wash., area. ISSI Data is a recognized national reseller and direct marketer of information security and storage infrastructure solutions.

The acquisition of ISSI Data will enable Media Recovery to harness the power of a strong inside sales operation and an expanded online catalog sales business.

From the time that Altus partner Bill Lawler joined the firm we saw the opportunity to build a practice we refer to as our Sales Process Optimization practice that has a major effect on Inside Sales operations. ISSI was one of the first clients where we saw the impact of optimizing the sales process from lead generation through acquisition, development and retention of clients’ sales organization. As the examples at the aforementioned link demonstrate, optimizing the sales process can have a dramatic effect on revenue and profitability. We are thrilled that ISSI has had a successful exit particularly in the midst of a tougher climate for exits.

ISSI was a great example of how Altus engages with a client to tap into the breadth of Altus’ expertise. Dave Jones was the original partner helping with business development. During that time, he brought in Dave Chase for a day to tap his knowledge around Internet marketing and lead generation and again when Chase helped on a 6-week Sales Learning Curve Assessment project. Later the baton was handed off to Bill Lawler to address the areas identified in the assessment which manifested itself as one of the first Sales Process Optimization projects.

Originally, we thought of the Sales Process Optimization practice as strictly a complement to our Sales Learning Curve and Outsourced Business Development practices that would apply later in a company’s lifecycle as was the case with ISSI. Instead, we have found that startups at a much earlier stage in their development are interested in ensuring their end to end sales process is optimized from day one. For example, NextNewsNet is a digital media startup in the local Internet media arena that is applying the Sales Process Optimization methodology as it prepares to make its first sales call. NextNewsNet’s team and advisors are some of the most seasoned and well known people in the Internet media business who know driving down the cost of customer acquisition is vital from Day One. It’s much cheaper to get it right from the early days than reengineering later.