So you're a new daily deal site? You don't have the advantage of a trusted brand with wide recognition. Your email list is not going to be the catalyst to drive your sales. Simply put, your quality of deals needs to exceed the deal quality of the big sites to overcome their brand recognition and drive sales. The daily deal landscape is littered with hundreds of local group buying sites that have built email lists and yet move minimal volumes for their advertisers.

Eventually email lists stop driving volume for the large sites too. Truly successful deals on all daily deal sites require a viral lift. Either the deal itself is interesting enough to compel buyers to share it via social media and email and talk about it with friends and colleagues or the deal volume for that deal will be in-line with site averages.  Successful deals also grow the email list, to boot.

So the success of a daily deal site comes down to the quality of its deals - and this is where the sales team is clutch. In fact, the largest players, Groupon and Living Social, are really competing on sales team strategies. Their email lists and software are perfect substitutes for one another. Groupon grew with a core centralized sales team and Living Social grew with more localized sales teams.

Any advantage your site is  going to have in your market is going to be based on your sales strategy in light of the incumbents' strategies.

Your site's future as a brand is determined early on by its perceived deal quality. Deal quality drives subscriber list growth and market share. Your sales strategy needs to identify quality in your market and succeed with those advertisers. It is good advice to drop advertisers not meeting your strategy's criteria - as poor quality deals will hurt your site's long-term prospects.

Here's a list of some deal characteristics that determine deal quality.  In future posts I will discuss these more. What characteristics did I miss?

• Audience - local, vertical, niche, etc.
• Discovery - awesome, unknown experience
• Value - discount
• Reputation - great businesses
• Social Media Presence - business is plugged in
• Terms - are they reasonable
• Large Appeal - within your audience
• Exclusivity - is this a special deal
• Exciting - will it get people talking
• Location - is it convenient to your audience
• Personal - be careful with this one - it can edge out the more important Discovery