A noncommissioned sales environment is another important ingredient of customer satisfaction, Hall has determined. As a retail shopper, he has been insulted once too often by computer-store clerks eschewing software shoppers in pursuit of the real money in hardware. Besides, in PCC's open setting, a salesperson on commission might be tempted to undercut another's overheard quotes. A strictly salaried force, on the other hand, is willing either to work patiently with callers or pass them on to specialists who can better help them. Sometimes customers themselves are attuned to the commission standard: "Shall I ask for you by name?" PCC salespeople often are asked. But when Hall considered assigning a permanent sales representative to each corporate account, invariably the customers answered: "That's not necessary, everyone is as good as everyone else.'
Being noncommissioned, a salesperson's efficiency can't be pinned down through conventional methods, especially since the PCC staff is encouraged to lavish not-necessarily-productive time on callers. As a stand-in for sales-per-employee analyses, a supervisor roams the aisles listening in on sales approaches, and errant sellers are coached into better techniques. Gumshoeing may be rather distasteful, Hall admits; then again, the snooper is apt to pick up a tip from the snoopee, who may have developed a twist that everyone can share.
In furtherance of PCC's one-for-all attitude, Hall has set up an internal system of "spifs' -- the trade term for cash premiums offered by vendors to retail salespeople for surpassing certain dollar volumes on given products. The idea is that if a salesperson knows there's a spif behind it, he or she will push that product over competing products. Hall, however, gathers the vendors' spifs into a blind pool, so salespeople won't be swayed by particular products. Sometimes, though, a spif is assigned to a specific set of products, such as when tax-preparation software began getting brisk play in February; Hall detected oh-no-not-another-tax-call grumblings from the sales floor, and soothed them by announcing a special spif for any tax program sold.
The effort to maintain service standards is far more demanding now than a few years back, Gallup acknowledges, if only because the pace of staffing is starting to slip behind PCC's torrid growth. In a chronically tight labor pool (in 1988 the unemployment rate in Cheshire County, N.H., was a meager 1.6%), PCC has been mounting recruitment programs that self-consciously extol the virtues of small-town isolation. "There are colder places to work than Marlow," one solicitation wryly points out, citing the Arctic and the Klondike as more challenging climes. In truth, Marlow's winter is apt to be nearly as rigorous, so PCC includes four studded snow tires and a set of ice-breaker windshield wipers among its benefits. Another appealing notion, Gallup offers tentatively, is that at lunchtime you can grab a quick ski.
In case those perks don't do the trick, Gallup and Hall are casting a more potent lure: a 100-acre plot of farmland on which they plan to build 10 houses, liberally spaced to avoid a company-town look. The houses are to be partially financed by PCC and sold at a modest cost-plus increment to employees who might otherwise not be able to afford their own.
Even after posting their first $100 million, PCC's two owners have yet to exhibit the familiar signs of fast-growth complacency that would place the next hundred million in jeopardy. "We never wait until we have a problem to come up with a solution," Gallup insists. "We come up with a solution before we have a problem." PCC has every returned product physically probed, for fear its reappearance may be signaling an about-to-widen headache. And Hall indefatigably reads every letter that comes in, lest he miss a hint of disaffection.
Especially evident problems, such as when Eastman Kodak suddenly downrated PCC in its supplier ratings, go right to customer-affairs director Haas. Getting to the bottom of this unacceptable turn of events, Haas rang up Kodak to find out what the problem was. You put packing slips inside your boxes, Kodak complained. "What's wrong with that -- don't you have to open the box to get at what's inside?" the perplexed Haas asked. Well, our receiving dock looks like a freight terminal gone mad, Kodak explained, and we can't afford to have to slice open the box, burrow through the packing material to find the slip, get the PO number, close up the box, and hope it makes it to the end-user without disappearing altogether.
Hmm, Haas pondered, the same thing is probably irritating any number of customers, only they haven't mentioned it. Now, PCC packers stick corporate-account packing slips on the outside. "I enjoy calls like that," he cheerfully confides. "They're opportunities to make someone happy."
Couldn't PCC consider not making people so happy, and settle into the unhurried up-country rhythm its founders originally intended? No way. To stay competitive in the mail-order business these days, you have to hold the undivided attention of manufacturers, and there's only one way to do that: move a lot of product. And Gallup and Hall know there's only one way to do that.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE COMPANY
Founded: February 1982
Primary line: Sells software and computer equipment by mail
Secondary line: Video production
Sales, 1982: $233,000
Sales, 1988: $120 million (estimated)
Six-year compound annual sales growth: 183% (estimated)
No. of employees, 1988: 210
Sales per employee, 1988: $571,000 (estimated)
