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Ability to Automate and Streamline the Process of Managing Advertisers is Vital to Increasing Revenues and Increasing Customer Satisfaction for Most Newspapers

San Jose, Calif., May 10, 2004 – Relationals, a leading provider of Internet-based Custom Relationship Management software for the world's largest newspaper, television, radio and magazine media businesses, today announced at the Editors and Publishers and Mediaweek Interactive Media Conference the general availability of Relationals, a powerful service focused exclusively on the daily needs and requirements of Media businesses by streamlining the process of attracting, retaining, and servicing advertisers.

"Relationals was created to meet the exacting requirements and unique workflow needs of the nations largest newspapers" said Rick McEachern, Chairman of Relationals. "We see enormous opportunities for improving profitability by providing customer lifecycle management solutions that let newspapers maximize the value of their relationship with the customer."

Everyone knows they need a better way to qualify, retain and satisfy advertisers – this is universal. Even small improvements can make a significant financially impact. According to the Bain Group, reducing advertiser churn 5% can improve profitability by 25 to 100%.

However, until now, the newspaper industry hasn't had a CRM solution built just for their needs, with their workflows, reflecting the type of relationships they have with their customers. Generic CRM implementations that worked in other industries just weren't relevant enough to the day-to-day requirements of media companies to be successful and only created frustration, confusion and complexity for newspapers and media companies and ultimately failed to deliver promised efficiencies and savings.

Enter Relationals

Relationals is a comprehensive customer relationship management service that tracks the entire advertiser lifecycle process from initial sales prospecting, through contract and campaign management and through insertion order creation and ad inventory management.

"After significant increases in our business, we realized the need for single customer relationship management tool, and the Relationals product contained all of the features we need," said Eric Johnston, New Media Director with Modbee, a McClatchy newspaper. "We believe that the potential for creating efficiencies and maximizing our workflow is enormous, ultimately helping to increase our sales performance and increase our profit margin."

To get started customers need make no infrastructure investments, hire additional personnel, setup or configuration servers or networks, hassle with security, backup and recovery, or other administrative worries - all those activities are handled by Relationals.

Account executives securely access the service from any computer with an Internet browser and quickly become productive using the system to track sales progress, gain pipeline visibility and improve revenue forecasting. From first advertiser contact with the integrated lead capture through integration with Billing and Ad Insertion order systems, Relationals has everything necessary to provide a seamless environment for your Account Executives keep track of a 360-degree view and comprehensive history of contacts, proposals, and contracts and campaigns with each customer. Relationals helps Account Executives maximize sales opportunities.

Some key Relationals CRM Suite features include:

• Calendaring and Tasks: Integrated appointment scheduling that's integrated with Outlook and the built in task list together provide a convenient portal for organizing the day.
• Account and Contact Management: Your customer information and contacts is a valuable knowledge base for your company. Keep track of all a complete customer history that your can mine for valuable information.
• Sales Automation: Keep track of your sales opportunities as they progress through various sales stages.
• Order Management: Create Ad Insertion orders for back end system processing. Ad insertion orders can be delivered in multiple formats.
• Contract Management: Track contracts and terms for each account. Renewal notifications prior to contract expirations help you maintain customer contact and capture recurring sales opportunities.
• Campaign and monthly spending management: Lets you create online or broadcast spending plans under each contract. Timing of spending can be variable by month to reflect contract terms.
• Creative Management: Creative documents and files can be kept with each contract or campaign to provide a historical repository for easy access and reuse.
• Customer Support Cases: Provide better customer support by tracking, escalating and resolving customer issues.
• Document Management: Instantly share presentations, rate sheets, with everyone on the sales team. Information is accessible from any Internet connection.
• Business Analytics: 30 standard reports provides your business with comprehensive information about your customers, the products their buying, the sales pipeline and the revenue forecast.
• Data Import/Export: Relationals can be directly integrated with your backend systems and to provide a seamless data exchange. Data from Act, Outlook, Goldmine or Corporate enterprise system can be easily imported.

This comprehensive and powerful feature set is only the beginning. The Relationals team works with each newspaper to make sure they are getting the most out of the system. The entire Relationals service can be customized to reflect the terminology, workflow and functionality each newspaper needs to conduct business.

"Relationals have been amazing to work with," said Harold Ong, Director of New Media for Corpus Christi Caller, an E.W. Scripps Newspaper. "They have very quickly responded to requests that have enhanced the product value for us."

About Relationals, Inc.

Relationals is a recognized leader in on demand CRM solutions for sales, marketing and customer service. Relationals Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, products and services strengthen customer relationships, improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs by streamlining the process of attracting, retaining, and servicing customers. Relationals is the most easy-to-use, feature-rich and cost effective CRM solution in the market. Relationals customers include newspapers from E.W Scripps, Knight Ridder, Lee Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Communications and ANG Newspapers.