Gannett Deploys 1,100 Seats of Relationals CRM across 45 Newspapers

Finance, Sales, and Marketing Teams All Using Web-Based CRM to Improve Advertising Operations

(SUNNYVALE, CA — August 15, 2007) Relationals, the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) for the publishing and media industry, announced today that Gannett Co. Inc. (NYSE: GCI) has deployed Relationals CRM to streamline sales operations, increase opportunity potential, and improve advertiser communication across 45 of their daily newspaper properties, including the The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Arizona Republic, The Indianapolis Star, and Asbury Park Press.

"Relationals CRM plays a critical role in changing the culture of Detroit Media Partnership's approach to advertising sales operations," says David Hunke, CEO of Detroit Media Partnership, a Gannett Co. company. "We required the most robust and configurable sales force automation and customer relationship management platform, and Relationals has been able to support even our most sophisticated requirements."

Best Practices Become Automated Processes

Using Relationals, Gannett has streamlined their operations by developing a set of best practices and automating processes to improve revenue opportunities including:

• Strategically managing and measuring lead distribution when importing from multiple sources, and creating automatic assignment and routing policies.
• Accelerating CRM adoption by minimizing the time and effort required to update customer contact information and opportunity pipeline, and creating telesales or email campaigns.
• Improving data quality of customer data within the CRM and with other systems in the organization (e.g. billing, accounting, etc.).

"Across the board, what makes the Gannett teams industry leaders is that they have the willingness and foresight to improve their company-wide operations," says Pankaj Malviya, CEO and President of Relationals. "Their approach fits ideally into the powerful capabilities of the Relationals on-demand platform."

About Gannett Co., Inc.
Gannett Co., Inc. is a leading international news and information company that publishes 85 daily newspapers in the USA, including USA TODAY, the nation's largest-selling daily newspaper. The company also owns nearly 1,000 non-daily publications in the USA and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine. Gannett subsidiary Newsquest is the United Kingdom's second largest regional newspaper company. Newsquest publishes nearly 300 titles, including 18 daily newspapers, and a network of prize-winning Web sites. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in the United States and is an Internet leader with sites sponsored by its TV stations and newspapers including USATODAY.com, one of the most popular news sites on the Web.

About Relationals
Relationals, a pioneer of robust, web-based, multi-tenant business applications, is a recognized leader in CRM and SFA solutions for sales, marketing and customer service. Relationals' highly adaptable CRM is helping major media industry leaders – like Hearst, Gannett, Nielsen, and E.W. Scripps – streamline the processes of attracting, retaining, and servicing customers. Its success is the direct result of being one of the most easy-to-use, feature-rich, and cost effective Web 2.0 platforms available.

On Demanding Sales Automation

There was a great, in-depth article by Jean Thilmany called "Custom Fits" (Copyright 2007, CRM Magazine/DestinationCRM.com) on the different ways Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions are being delivered. But in trying to balance the tide between on-demand, on-premise and open source solutions, we think they neglected some key advantages on-demand solutions provide:

• Many businesses don't have the IT bandwidth to manage and customize systems to their teams and even if they bought a system outright, they would still have to learn and be trained on them to service them properly in-house. This can be doubly true for open-source tools.
• Organizations that are tapped in just their ability to support their core business strengths and values, may not have IT as the top of their list. And visa versa, sales automation might not be the top of the IT concerns either. So getting support for SFA initiatives can be challenging.
• For businesses that are in fairly dynamic markets (virtually any market that's competitive is dynamic) and require a sales team to adapt with those changes, you can change processes fairly quickly and easily with on-demand solutions. There aren't many on-premise providers who can do that without significant consultation and customization fees.
• On-demand SFAs/CRMs are more than just renting. Vendors are constantly updating and improving the service so its customers instantly get new features whereas on-premise solutions require staged upgrades, testing, budget allocation, maintenance, deployment, etc. So you have to think about software more as a utility than as a ownership. You don't own the electricity you use, you pay for what you consume.

Thilmany makes one great point, however, that with a little bit of work tuning the the right SFA solution to your business processes, a great SFA can be created. It's one of the areas Relationals prides itself on.