Local Search: Enormous Opportunity - Complex Solutions

I enjoyed the Yext presentation at TechCrunch50. The challenge in pitching a local solution is the enormity of the opportunity and complexity of the needed solutions. The panel’s questions demonstrated why pitching local search is so hard. Marc Andreessen didn’t seem to agree that local businesses want phone calls and not clicks. Marc asked about emails – seeming to question why any business would bother answering their phone when they could respond to email (btw Marc, many merchants do not answer the phone and that’s part of the problem). The questions rolled over to categories and again illustrated the unique challenges in local (2000+ categories)

I agree with Yext that leakage and dirty calls are a real problem with ppcall. My company, FastCall411 uses parallel dialing as one potential fix - not only to connect to multiple merchants but more so to capture connection rate data on multiple merchants. Find out who will answer the phone (and wants the lead) and each future call is more efficient. Yext is using analytics to examine key words. This is very clever and hopefully not too complicated (though I'd hate to try to explain it to a local merchant). Merchants want good clean calls and Yext is clearing the way for innovative solutions in this market.

BTW, The awesome use of the word awesome!