Company Profile: The Missing Link

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This time her homework was dedicated to her channel: Narodick, Vetras, and the team talked to industry analysts and retail buyers and venture investors to suss out the superstores' inventory and expansion plans. They scoured the retail trade press, the annual reports and prospectuses of publicly traded retailers, and the forecasts of hardware manufacturers. Narodick and nearly everyone at Edmark hit the aisles themselves.

Indeed, traditional software stores were greatly expanding their shelf space, and software like Edmark's was popping up in unusual venues: on bookstore shelves and in toy-store displays and, most notable of all, in the cavernous aisles of mass merchants like Wal-Mart and Price Club.

But Edmark, Narodick knew, needed to do more than just get its software onto those shelves; the company needed a system for tracking its progress from them. Where were Edmark's products moving? Where were they sold out? How were they positioned on the shelf? What were the company's rivals up to? Borrowing an idea from the company's competitors, Vetras deployed part-time field merchandisers in 10 major metropolitan markets to augment the employee shoppers from Edmark.

"Information is power," says Vetras, who winced at what the first few field reports revealed. In some stores Edmark's products weren't making it out of the stockroom. They were sometimes poorly placed or poorly understood by salespeople. "All of a sudden we started to know what was hurting us," he says.

Edmark's merchandisers fanned out to stock shelves, demonstrate products, and teach store personnel how to sell Edmark. Their biweekly field reports gave managers the skinny on buyers, shelf position, and inventory levels. They told headquarters which promotions worked. They delivered the lowdown on what the competition was doing and how to respond. They faxed and phoned in leads. And they provided all that for an annual cost of about $25,000 each, according to Vetras.

The stock outages abated. Sell-through improved. Inventory turned over quicker.

Meanwhile, the sales force pressed its campaign to jimmy open big accounts. None was more desired than Comp USA, the computer-superstore chain.

"Almost every day, Sally would come into my office and say, 'When are we going to break into Comp USA?" recalls Vetras. "If we weren't there," he says, "we might as well get out of this business."

For months Edmark had been frustrated in its attempts to court a Comp USA buyer and get its line onto those shelves. With so much new product in the pipeline, the company urgently needed to crack the account. "Somebody in that account was going to give us a hearing," Vetras recalls thinking.

Narodick reluctantly agreed to foot the bill for Vetras and his team to attend a pricey trade show called Retail Vision that spring. For $15,000 they'd get 20 minutes of face time with high-level buyers. They chose the mass-merchant and superstore channels, where they knew they'd find higher-ups from Comp USA, among other chains. They copied the homework Narodick never ceased doing on the industry, packed their presentations with the data, loaded what demos they had onto their laptops, and headed for the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton.

This time they let the show begin: there was the guy in the orangutan suit -- playing a character from Thinkin' Things -- beating a drum for Edmark. There were the T-shirts that trumpeted "I partied with an animal."

"I threw a fit over that one," recalls Edmark's restrained boss. "But the sales team was right."

Edmark, which had learned to make extraordinary products that reviewers lauded and users loved, was now learning showmanship -- how to shake it with its distributors.

After Vetras had returned to headquarters the following Monday, he got a call from a vice-president at Comp USA, asking a simple question: "Why aren't we carrying your line?" "I thought someone was playing a joke," Vetras recalls.

Three months later, in the summer of 1994, Comp USA signed a $150,000 purchase order for the entire line. Edmark agreed to ante up for joint marketing programs, including events Comp USA dubbed Educational Expos. Could Edmark send reps to work the weekend events? Of course, Vetras said. When he asked where to dispatch the reps, he was given 51 locations -- 10 cities to be covered on each of five weekends. It didn't require much arithmetic to figure out that his part-time merchandisers couldn't handle that. It would take more than half the company.

Vetras and his team put a sales kit together and gave Edmark employees -- people in accounting, in technical support, and in testing, many of whom had never sold anything -- a crash course on how to demonstrate and sell a product. "People were blowing out of here on Friday afternoons like commandos. It was a rallying point for the whole company," Vetras says. "Anyone who thought selling was a matter of doing lunch and taking an order got a taste of reality."

Comp USA applauded Edmark's act. Comp USA executives in Dallas called store managers in every location at which an expo had taken place. "We were getting straight A's," says Vetras.

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