YPG Group of Canada, which is widely considered as one of the best positioned Yellow Pages companies in the world, will continue to focus on manning its sales channel, resisting efforts to rely too heavily on self serve solutions, according to YPG Chairman Marc Tellier.

“Search engine companies will privately admit self service isn’t working,” says Tellier. “That’s the position were in. It is too easy to go to the lowest cost channel.”

Tellier noted that roughly 75 percent of his sales force is now face to face, up from 50 percent when he arrived seven years ago. The rest is largely phone-based. “We’re investing in the sales organization to provide that valuable advice” to small businesses.

One of the keys to the future success of the company is to make the sales channel more efficient, Tellier added. “We are transitioning from a product driven to a service driven approach,” he said. Along those lines, all the YPG reps have tablet pcs and wireless connectivity. The tablets enable reps to consummate 87 percent of sales directly, without any administrative intervention.