Yahoo Sales Director Returns to His Roots in Electronics
John Schirmer heads to SupplyFrame, an ad-supported online electronics components information service.
Yahoo Sales Director John Schirmer is leaving the job to become vice president of worldwide sales for SupplyFrame, an online electronics component information service that serves highly-contextual ads to engineers and others searching for supplies.
Schirmer is uniquely qualified for his new job because, prior to working for Yahoo, he served as group publisher of EDN, Electronics News, and Electronic Business, said Jeff Curie, SupplyFrame, VP of marketing. “It’s an interesting story,” said Curie. “John was the publisher of…a big print publications in the electronics space. He saw the writing on the wall about online three years ago and decided to join Yahoo to learn about Yahoo marketing and online ads. He saw the online ad thing coming and SupplyFrame is built purely to be the online ad solution for the electronics business.”
Given Schirmer’s experience in both the electronics supply industry and online ad industry, the SupplyFrame post is “purely a serendipity event,” added Curie. “For John, it was like, `I know this business and this is where I cut my teeth.’ It’s kind of like perfect for him to take all his experience from Yahoo and jump over to SupplyFrame.”
Curie said SupplyFrame gets about 1.6 million unique visitors monthly, a good number for a business-to-business site. Being specialized, SupplyFrame connects electronics advertisers to design engineers and procurement professionals by delivering ads to them while they are conducting component research, Curie said. “We have direct advertising relationships with a lot of big manufacturers and distributors,” he said. “We actually know what the products are that people are looking at, so we can target ads on specific product categories and parts.”
Schirmer will be “the guy who is going take us to really having a professional, full-blown worldwide sales force,” said Curie. “He’s streamlining our sales processes and we expect it is going to have a huge impact. He’s a known quantity to our customers.”
