How Partners Sell Yext: Part One

It’s hard out there for Local Marketers and SEOs, but Yext is here to help. Don’t make the #1 mistake we see over and over.

Our goal is to help you to be successful and to ensure that Yext supports that success. To that end, we’ve put together a guide walking you through how to get the most out of Yext by positioning the product properly inside of your own service offerings. This will make you more successful, and it will also keep you away from the most common mistake made by Yext Partners.

The Biggest Mistake a Partner Can Make:

Selling Just Yext.

So why would selling just Yext, as a standalone service, be a bad thing? To put it in the most honest terms: if one of our Partners is really only selling Yext, with no other value added services, they are going to be disappointed quickly.

At Yext, we sell our services to DIY small business owners for $999 per year. We sell Yext through a highly trained team of salespeople that specifically (and only) sell Yext as a standalone product for a living. This means that if your potential client (or even a current client) searches for “List my Business” on Google or any other search engine, they are likely to end up talking to our sales team and learning about Yext and our pricing at some point.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that if all you market is a standalone Yext product, then you are directly competing with our sales team for effectively the same service. While you have a couple advantages here (namely monthly pricing and direct client support), it’s still going to be difficult to compete on exactly the same product offering to savvy small business owners that think they can save money using Yext themselves. You need to differentiate your offering, highlighting why your additional service and expertise is not only needed, but incredibly cost effective.

Don’t get us wrong, we know how much benefit a professional brings to the Yext platform. We further believe that by having a professional at the helm of Yext, the small business will likely see far better results than if they do it themselves. However, this isn’t about what we believe; it only matters what you can prove. And proving to someone that the extra money spent for the professional marketer is worthwhile can be more difficult when they have a lower annual price quote from Yext for access to the same tools.

This is why Partners need to have more in their value proposition beyond listing correction or Yext as a standalone. In fact, we surveyed a number of our more successful Yext Certified Partners to see just how they explain and price their services. Below is a guide that walks through some of these pricing packages, service offerings, and bundled solution ideas to help all Partners get an understanding of what seems to truly resonate with small business clients.

Positioning Your Business for Success with Yext

A very common feature of our more successful Partner offerings is that, typically, they don’t mention Yext or even PowerListings by name. Many choose, instead, to bundle Yext into their offering. These resellers choose to explain benefits and features of working with them rather than simply naming Yext as a solution. This isn’t to say that our Partners don&##8217;t credit using Yext somewhere on their site; however, they typically do this away from their product offerings and bundled package explanations (for example, in a blog post). The reason is pretty simple when you think about it — does your dentist tell you what brand of spinning toothbrush he uses when he cleans your teeth? In general, the answer is no because the services the dentist is offering run far beyond showing you how to brush your teeth and floss better.

Here’s a very basic example of this value proposition for your clients, adapted from some of our partners and other SEO houses:

At its most basic, your value proposition to the client has to be that what you can do for them is beyond anything they could do for themselves. Yext is a means to reaching this goal; citation management done manually is time consuming, tedious, and in no way permanent. You can do so much more than that with Yext, and it’s important to cover what those benefits are to prospects in a consistent way.

Remember: there are real advantages available to our Partners. First, you can offer monthly pricing, whereas small businesses cannot get that directly from Yext. Second, you can bundle other key services, such as claiming a Google Place, providing Social Media support, web design, SEO audits — basically anything! Third, you have the expertise to leverage Yext’s tools across a broader marketing objective, ensuring that each service offered will be leveraged appropriately. Many businesses’ clients and prospects won’t intuitively understand these advantages, so it’s best to lay them out in a package or bundled offering.

Note: All examples included in this post are intended to be illustrative and not templates. Pricing, bundling, and service offerings are based on multiple real partners, but what works for you depends on your company size, the types of clients you have, and which market you’re in.

The above example of services is an over-simplification of what is possible. Digging in a little deeper, we see that the value proposition of our most successful Partners is more than just “I can do more than you can” because you have access to more tools and leverage than that. The following are some tiered pricing models and expanded service offerings adapted from actual Partners, SEO shops, Web Designers, and SEM firms.

In the above example, the reseller is using a tiered pricing model that includes/excludes certain services based on what the client is willing to pay. It’s implied (but not stated explicitly) that the most basic package is simply a portion of Yext with a few additional services thrown in. Note that Yext is not named anywhere, as well, and that the Yext platform services are broken out into individual line-items. Also note that the amount of attention a client receives varies by price point; clients who choose a more basic service get fewer updates per month and menu uploads than higher-tier clients — even though those distinctions don’t exist in Yext directly. In other words, the Yext Certified Partner is offering specific limits on what they will do, even though the Yext service doesn’t charge more for things like adding a new menu or updating more frequently.

Below we have an alternate example which is more strongly service-oriented:

In this example, the reseller charges a flat fee to take on the client initially, then offers web design and print services beyond some of the Yext platform offerings. As you can see, just like the previous table, this reseller bundles the Yext service alongside a number of other offerings. Notably, this reseller works with brick-and-mortar businesses that run fitness classes and group exercise boot camps, so they offer print and web design services as part of their package.

Tailoring your service offering to any specific group of business clients you work with (doctors’ offices, law firms, real estate agents, taxidermists, etc.) may have huge benefits. For one, not each of those groups will need the same services from you. For example, the doctors’ office may need specific branding and print materials design, whereas the law firm needs website development and webpage SEO services. We have seen that many of our Certified Partners choose to focus on several specific verticals, offering slightly different packages to each based on their needs. We’ve also seen a heavy geo-centric bias toward working with customers in an area close to the Partner’s headquarters. This, in all likelihood, is because a more personal touch is possible when the client resides close by.

You can also parcel out how much of the Yext platform each client receives access to based on price — in other words, as long as you mask your use of Yext, you can control how much of the platform you make available to clients. We often point out that the more optimized a location is, the better its citation consistency will appear around the internet. To achieve this, we’ve built a Content Capture tool to help you get content and information from each client in a white-labeled manner. How premium a feature you want to make the Content Capture system is up to you, but here’s an example that leverages the Yext platform to divide clients into segments by price:

Being Successful as a Local Marketer Leveraging Yext

As you can see, making Yext an item in your local marketing arsenal is a way to make your business successful. You have to offer services and options beyond the Yext platform. You can also separate aspects of the Yext platform and bundle them with other services to create a tiered pricing model for your clients.

At this point, you likely see the value of using tiered pricing and/or adding additional services to your offerings, but what services should you include to maximize your ROI for your clients? We’ll be covering that in Part Two, specifically addressing how a successful SEO offering may be just the solution.