Fanfare Media Works: Remote Control
Professional Services
Written by John Zorabedian   
Friday, 29 February 2008
Fanfare Media Works: Remote Control - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
CEO Brendan Ross is attempting to use technology to create a virtual office for sales reps working remotely in their local markets.
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Selling ads is a highly local business, particularly when the advertisers are small businesses of the type that advertise on supermarket shopping carts, circulars, and register tape. For Fanfare Media Works (FMW), its decentralized national network of sales reps requires an operational efficiency that can break down easily without the proper technology to support it.

Fanfare Media Works: Remote Control - American Executive - RedCoat Publishing
Brendan Ross, CEO
With 1,000 outside sales reps spread throughout the country, Valencia, Calif.-based FMW needs to support its salespeople remotely while maintaining strong enough ties to increase communication, training, and sales. FMW was struggling with this business model when a private equity firm, Blackstreet Capital Management, bought the company in July 2007 and installed new leadership.

Brendan Ross took over as CEO with a plan to revitalize the company’s sales through tools to recruit and support its outside sales force. Formerly the president of ReserveAmerica, one of several Web companies operated by IAC (its other brands include Ask.com and Citysearch), Ross’ vision for the company involves using Web-based technology to support “the office of the future,” he said.

One way that FMW can augment expensive in-person training in remote locations is to provide training and quality assurance from its headquarters in Valencia, connecting to the reps through Internet telephony and Web tools. “Advertising is a real local thing,” Ross said. “You want to have people that know the area making the calls, but you want to be training them as frequently as possible with your best talent, regardless of geography.”

Technical support
The new management at FMW recognized very quickly that the simplest way to increase sales is to increase the number of sales reps that work for the company. “That helped us bring our focus at every level to figuring out how to hire more reps,” Ross said.

FMW opted to use the services of OpenHire, an online recruiting service that allows the company to track applicants and centralize its recruiting through job boards, newspaper advertisements, and other media in one location. The service also allows the company to evaluate new reps and calculate how recruitment advertising dollars translate into sales.  

Ross envisions a further division of labor to allow sales reps more time for closing sales and less time researching and chasing down prospects. His plan is to increase the number of workers setting appointments for sales reps from its current level of 30 to what he hopes may eventually match the number of reps.

This telemarketing position requires a different skill set from the sales rep, allowing the company to recruit people that wouldn’t have fit the traditional mold of prospect, visit, close. “In local advertising, it’s really true that time is money,” Ross said. “We want every member of our sales team—whether telemarketer or field closer—doing what they love best all day long.”

FMW is also developing proprietary software that will automate prospecting by pulling phone numbers from Web sites and feeding them into a searchable database for the telemarketers, increasing their efficiency by cutting down on research time.

Finally, Ross envisions freeing the company from having to use office space and infrastructure to support telemarketers in call centers by converting to Internet telephony. Eventually, the company will use an Internet telephone system to allow telemarketers to access the company’s dialing system from their homes.

This virtual call center would allow the company to run functions such as quality assurance from the corporate headquarters in Valencia. “We’re figuring out how to use technology to take things that the company has been doing in a toe-dipping way to the next level,” Ross said. “Call center technology has been turned upside down in the last five years, with Internet-based call center players placing full-featured call center tech in the hands of small companies.”

Recruiting the sales force
The most vital statistic in recruiting and retaining an outside sales force is how much those salespeople can make. With their incomes based entirely on commission, FMW needs to offer a value proposition better than comparable companies to attract the best salespeople.

“The most important metric is how much our salespeople can make per hour,” Ross said. “That’s the way we can get the best quality salespeople, figuring out how to have their incomes go up.”

The strategy for expanding sales boils down to expanding the number of telemarketing appointment setters, which can increase sales for the reps, allowing FMW to attract and retain the best possible sales force. Putting all of this in place, however, requires a commitment to change the way the company has historically done business.

“Whenever a business has done things the same way for a really long time, the battle it’s fighting is against inertia,” Ross said. “You have to have the guts to make the changes that you believe in, the sensitivity to listen carefully to the people that work for you, and the energy to keep the business moving.”

Enhancing communication to the remote sales reps and telemarketers, through e-mail and by the company’s traveling managers, is key to motivating them to improve their performance, Ross said.

“An organization like ours is always going to have communication challenges,” he said. “Communication is usually one of the easiest thing to fix but suffers the most when a company stagnates.”
 
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