By 1992 the Hull Yellow Pages had become so popular with both telephone subscribers and advertisers that it was necessary to split the directory into two separate books, business and residential.
Contemporaneously with this in July 2004 Yell announced that they were directly entering the Hull classified directory marketplace for the first time, thereby creating the classic David & Goliath scenario where Yell, as the national Goliath, took on Hull Colour Pages' regional David.
Despite particularly high levels of advertising spend Yell were not able to gain more than a toehold in the Hull marketplace as Hull Colour Pages not only retained customers and revenue but in a positive response to the national threat posed by Yell, introduced new sales strategies that were successful in maintaining and growing the customer base and advertising revenues.
The success of this sales strategy was recognised in 2005 when the Hull Colour Pages sales team was declared 'Sales Team of the Year' at the Data Publishers Association (DPA) Awards and the Hull Colour Pages was highly commended in the Directory of the Year section.
These developments combined with the continued high performance on advertising sales has resulted in Hull Colour Pages being recognised by the UK trade-body for directories, The DPA (Data Publishers Association) with short-listings in five categories for the DPA AWards in October 2008.