Sales Chief Is the Latest to Depart From Yahoo

Yahoo said Sunday that Wenda Harris Millard, its longtime chief sales officer, is leaving amid a reorganization of Yahoo’s sales team.

Ms. Millard, who joined Yahoo in October of 2001, said Sunday that she resigned to become president for media at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Ms. Millard is a well-regarded executive on Madison Avenue and is the latest in a string of executives to leave Yahoo since an overhaul began in December. Her departure comes less than a week after Terry S. Semel, the chief executive, resigned amid growing unrest among shareholders over Yahoo’s lagging performance.

The revamping of Yahoo’s sales teams is the first organizational change announced since a co-founder, Jerry Yang, stepped in as chief executive and Susan L. Decker was promoted to president last week. The two are under intense pressure from Wall Street to improve Yahoo’s performance. Just last week Ms. Decker said that sales of graphical ads would be weaker than previously expected.

Ms. Decker said in an interview Sunday morning that Ms. Millard’s departure was the result of a long-planned merger of two separate groups, one charged with selling graphical ads and another responsible for selling the small text ads that appear alongside search results. The merged sales group will be run by David Karnstedt, who until now ran Yahoo’s search sales business. Mr. Karnstedt will now be head of North American sales reporting to Gregory Coleman, Yahoo’s executive vice president of global sales.

After the reorganization, Ms. Millard, who ran the graphical ads sales unit, was no longer needed, Ms. Decker said. “We made the decision to bring our sales forces together,” Ms. Decker said. “In making that decision, we felt we needed one leader.”

Ms. Millard said she was part of the team that planned the merging of the ad units and was slated to become head international sales. At the same time, Ms. Millard said she was weighing several other options. “I actually resigned this morning and I am taking one of those offers,” she said.

Executives who left Yahoo recently said that they expected departures of executives to continue, especially in the sales department, which is under pressure to deliver better results. “You are going to see a lot of people on the branded ad sales side leave,” one former Yahoo executive said recently. “There is tremendous day to day pressure to meet numbers.”

Yahoo hopes the organizational change will reinvigorate its sales with marketers who are increasingly seeking a simple way to buy all types of online advertisements. “The advertising marketplace is moving faster than a speeding bullet and advertisers are increasingly seeking solutions that span a wide variety of products,” said Mr. Coleman. “When we combine those unique assets, you can deliver better results for our customers.”

Ms. Millard joined Yahoo just as the bottom was falling from under the online ad market, after the collapse of the dot-com bubble. When the online market rebounded, Ms. Millard was instrumental in establishing Yahoo as destination for Fortune 500 companies to market their brands, said Stewart Barry, a securities analyst with ThinkEquity Partners.

While the company’s top properties like the Yahoo.com front page and the company’s finance sites, are performing well with those advertisers, Yahoo has experienced weakness in the sale of so-called nonpremium inventory, ad space that appears on lesser known portions Yahoo or alongside e-mail messages, Mr. Barry said.

“That takes sophisticated use of data and is a different type of sales process, and is not Wenda’s core competency,” Mr. Barry said.

It is in the sale of those non-premium graphical ads that Yahoo faces the most intense competition from the likes MySpace and Facebook, as well as countless of smaller Web sites that increasingly rely on advertising to support their business.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com