Dial-A-Rep
As
Field Sales Forces Retreat, Will Telereps Take Up the
Slack?
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MAY 2002)
Opened
nearly a quarter-century ago, Auntie’s Bookstore is
a solid fixture on the corner of Main and Washington
Streets in downtown Spokane, Washington, a bustling
burg of almost 200,000 that boasts the largest book-buying
population between Seattle and Minneapolis. Judging
by the number of publisher sales reps spotted in recent
years, however, Auntie’s may as well be in midtown Siberia.
“We’re out in the middle of close to nowhere,” owner
Chris O’Harra says. “We even have commission
reps now who don’t come out. You know things are seriously
changing in the business.” It’s a sign of the times,
then, that on a recent morning head buyer Julie Smith
logged nearly three hours on the phone with Publishers
Group West, working through the list of new titles
after the store’s regular PGW rep was reassigned. “We
really have a lot of trouble now with the mid-size companies
like Abrams who just kind of vanish,” O’Harra
explains. “They used to be with a commission rep, but
we don’t see anybody now.”
And when publishing’s foot-soldiers fall off the map,
phone reps like those at PGW are left holding the line
between a book order and oblivion. “Telephone sales,”
as O’Harra says, “is better than nothing.” Call them
what you will — telemarketers, inside sales teams, telereps,
or robo-reps — for reasons of economy and efficiency,
phone reps are shouldering a growing range of the repping
burden, handling initial sales and reorders for many
accounts, tag-teaming with field reps to cover author
events and co-op snafus, and even cold-calling new stores
to drum up business. While telereps still account for
a small proportion of revenue — estimates range from
1% to 10% of a given publisher’s sales — it’s clear
that speed-dialers are pushing out mud-spattered Subarus
as the weapon of choice for book publishers, both for
better and for worse.
Left
Off the Hook?
Strapped
for time themselves, many booksellers say they’d take
a well-trained telerep over a strung-out sales visit
any day. “For my schedule, it really works best to do
this by phone, rather than in-person,” says Luanne
Ripley Kreutzer of St. Helens Book Shop in
Oregon. As the store’s owner-buyer, Kreutzer doesn’t
have much leisure time for shop visits, not that many
reps would show up if she did. Since the store is so
far off the map she only sees one major house rep each
season — “Field reps from the major houses have always
been scarce in the ten years that I’ve been doing business,”
she notes — the telereps take care of everything from
counselling Kreutzer “oh-so-subtly” on what to buy,
to “just being the one to help me navigate through co-op.”
Sometimes, however, the line goes cold. “When your rep
changes, you often don’t know it,” Kreutzer says, the
upshot being that her orders have gotten delayed or
dropped altogether. And with certain publishers, the
line seems to be permanently off the hook. “I have asked
for a telephone rep for at least three years from a
major house, and have yet to be assigned one,” she says.
“As a result, they’ve lost their sales to me.”
It’s not just out-of-the-way accounts that are getting
the telerep treatment. “I used to get visited by almost
every major publisher,” says Joi Afzal, co-owner
of the Hue-Man Experience bookstore in Denver.
“All of that has really started to diminish over the
last year.” Now the only rep she sees is from Time
Warner and maybe one or two other stragglers who
turn up on her stoop. Nonetheless, working with Random
House and HarperCollins telereps has been
pretty smooth sailing. “In essence it’s the same thing,”
she says. “I get the attention I would from the field
sales rep.” Meanwhile, Fern Jaffe, owner of Paperbacks
Plus in the Bronx, raves about her Random telerep,
who has visited the store — booksellers say visits can
be the major factor in a telerep’s success — and is
“as good if not better than most field reps,” says Jaffe.
But a telerep handling the mass market line for Simon
& Schuster was quite another story. “He was
a young snippy kid who was telling me, having never
seen my store, what I should be buying,” Jaffe says.
“After 32 years, I know how many copies of Star Wars
I need. I took myself off telemarketing.”
In no mood for busy signals, buyers at the heavy-hitting
independents are digging in their heels. Paul Yamazaki
at City Lights, for example, says that telereps
haven’t yet come ringing, and rues the day they do.
“We still see the field reps and commission reps,” he
says with evident relief. “I can’t imagine replacing
them with phone reps, given the long-term relationships
we’ve built out here.” Ditto for Kathi Kirby,
Purchasing and Publisher Relations Manager at Powell’s
Books in Portland, OR. “I’m assuming that phone
reps loom in our future, but it hasn’t happened yet,”
she says. “We don’t deal with phone reps at all. Not
even in tandem. If that were to happen we’d have to
really evaluate how we buy our books.” In a first step
down that road, however, mid-size publishers have dumped
commission reps based in the Northwest and switched
to house reps who may as well be from planet Xenon.
“The new house reps cover too much territory, don’t
know us, and don’t care too much,” she says. Harvard,
MIT, and Yale ditched a local group and
went with a rep in Detroit. And service has sunk. “He’s
a nice guy that we see for 20 minutes twice a year,”
Kirby says. “I’m not saying we have to do business the
way it’s been done for ages. But it has to be more than
twice a year. It has to involve a real partnership.”
Penguin
Comes Calling
That’s
just the way publishers like to talk about their telesales
programs. “We visualize this as a business partnership,
and that is exactly how we work,” says Eleanor Jones,
Corporate Director of Inside Sales for Penguin Putnam.
Over 18 years the telephone sales department has more
than tripled from six to its current staff of 22. Based
at Penguin’s Kirkwood, NY distribution center, the tele-force
mirrors field rep divisions, with the phone group split
into four adult hardcover reps, four trade paperback
reps, and six children’s reps. Each phone rep is teamed
with two or three of the company’s 50 field reps, with
the field force tackling larger accounts, and the phone
force backing them up and also tending smaller or left-field
accounts. The phone reps also attend sales conferences,
and are encouraged to visit accounts that are within
a day’s driving distance from their home base. “Part
of our job is also to prospect for new business,” Jones
says. “We do some cold calling as time allows. We grow
and develop the smaller accounts.” The group also places
a premium on familiarity with the stores. Jones recalls
working as a phone rep with Doug Whiteman (now
president of Penguin’s children’s division), who as
a field rep in Colorado would call in almost daily,
describing in novelistic detail the demographics of
various towns so that Jones would have some clue how
to pitch booksellers. Overall, Penguin strives for what
Katya Olmsted, Director of Field Sales for Penguin’s
adult hardcover group, calls “a tremendous camaraderie
between our field reps and our inside force. I don’t
let the field reps dump the bureaucratic work on them,”
she adds. Though phone reps are paid sales commissions,
they are compensated in a way that downplays competition:
“We incentivize, but we look at the whole business.”
A similar logic guides Random House’s phone unit, which
is based at its Westminster, MD distribution center.
“Telemarketers are at the forefront of our integrated
sales effort for frontlist and backlist titles,” says
a Random spokesman. More than 15 full-time reps are
divided by specialty and geography, so that in addition
to regional responsibilities, telereps focus on areas
such as African American, women’s fiction, or gay/lesbian
titles. Moreover, telereps sell titles across the entire
corporate spectrum, a range no other Random sales force
spans. They too prospect for new accounts, and now attend
regional trade shows in addition to sales conferences.
One Random source estimates that telereps account for
10% of the field sales by dollar value.
For publishers without their own telereps, distributors
such as CDS have developed a hybrid phone/field
approach, says VP Sales Stanley Cohen. To get
independent stores revved up about Robert James Waller’s
A Thousand Country Roads, for example, CDS partnered
with the ABA’s Book Sense program to have
a San Francisco–based rep phone all 1,200 or so Book
Sense accounts. (Orders for the Madison County epilogue
were up to some 350,000 copies.) Normally, all of the
distributor’s reps play both phone and field roles,
following catalog mailings up with a phone call or visit.
Other options include the independent firm Phone
Books, based in White Plains, NY, which has 10,000
stores in its database (searchable in categories such
as children’s or specialty stores) and can deploy as
many as 10 phones for a major campaign, according to
Marketing Manager Ted Valand. Most reps come
from retail bookstores, and they typically hold mini–sales
conferences (one Phone Books rep visits a publisher
sales conference, and then reports back). Orders are
faxed in the same day. The company handles contingencies,
too. If a publisher rep has already blown through, say,
Detroit when an author drops by, “they’ll ask us to
call all the bookstores in Detroit and let them know
that the author’s going to be there,” Valand says.
Back in Spokane, O’Harra from Auntie’s Bookstore has
a suggestion she’d like to make: Pshaw with the phones.
“I’m waiting for the time when they just send us videos,”
she says. “You could watch a video of the rep, and if
you weren’t interested in the book, you could just fast-forward.”
©2002
Publishing Trends
