A dealership doesn’t approach its 50th anniversary without the ability to pivot in the wake of a significant business disruption. Fraser Advanced Information Systems (AIS) was coming off a banner year in which it realized nearly 20% growth. But once the COVID-19 alarm sounded, President Bill Fraser and his executive team quickly saw an opportunity to elevate the company’s game and emerge from the pandemic a stronger and smarter organization.
The West Reading, Pennsylvania-based dealership has $50 million in annual sales in its sights, but whether that magic number is attained by year’s end is not part of the big picture. The COVID pause has enabled the company to hit the business gym, and Fraser AIS has already nearly doubled its investment in training time over 2019 through the first seven months of this year. More recent offerings such as unified communications/
telephony and AV are steering the firm more into bundled services in support of the Smart Office platform, and technology specialization experts are adding heft to the sales process.
It is yet another evolution in Fraser AIS’ history path. Through the years, Fraser has never hesitated to seek out help that would ensure his company is putting its best foot forward. Perseverance is one of the firm’s core competencies, and whether it was enlisting the help of Mike Riordan to build a quality organization, Tom Johnson to conduct an evaluation and provide benchmarks, or more recently, Kate Kingston to provide the nuances of selling in a pandemic, Fraser AIS has always sought continuous improvement.
The dealer serves the tri-state (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware) region’s education, health care, manufacturing, engineering, legal and finance verticals—including a sizeable chunk of large and enterprise-level clients—through its Smart Office hub of offerings. Whether it’s MFPs, managed services, production print, unified communications, Sharp AQUOS boards and displays, or other collaboration/communication tools, Fraser AIS is discovering new and exciting ways to deliver on one of its many core values: to strive for excellence.
We spoke with Fraser, Vice President of Sales Melissa Confalone and COO Jim Pierce about how this unique period has allowed the dealership to sell wider within its base as it adapts to the changed business reality.
How was business in 2019, and during 2020 in the months leading up to the pandemic? What were the keys that dictated your success?
Pierce: In 2019, we achieved $47.1 million in sales, which represented nearly 19% growth over the previous year. We were on a roll during the first three months of 2020 prior to the pandemic. We’ve always focused on taking care of the customer, including our internal ones—our team members. Our key drivers are the customer, the technology and the team; it’s the team that drives the other two. We do a tremendous amount of work in developing the team through training and education. We’ve done about 13,000 hours of training year to date after doing 7,600 hours in 2019 and 8,000 in 2018. That’s been critical in helping us develop the Smart Office with Sharp and their technology.
Confalone: As we crossed the $40 million mark, we started attracting and hiring better talent. We layered our sales force with more resources on the front end for presales, software presales, production specialists and managed print specialists. Combined with team selling, that really helped drive our growth. We do a good amount of business in mid- to large-size businesses and enterprise accounts, and that requires team selling. We focus like a laser on new business and invest a lot of time going after net-new accounts, which represent about 33% of our business.
What sets Fraser Advanced Information Systems apart from the competition?
Fraser: Our core values have always guided us, and they have helped us through this difficult period. We’ve always been a company that has done the right thing for our customers and our employees. We strive for excellence and demonstrate a will to win. During COVID, one aspect that really came to the foreground was empowered employees. If our people were faced with going into environments where they didn’t feel safe—perhaps client employees weren’t wearing masks—they would not go in to support that client. Our managers would then get in touch with the client to ensure the environment was safe and secure for our employees to enter. It’s critical to let people know how much you care about them during this type of crisis.
We have a set of core competencies wrapped around customer focus, integrity and trust, strategic agility and perseverance. These have a profound impact on our business. We have a high retention rate for both customers and employees, and we are continuously improving. That’s long been a key to our success. During the COVID period, the strategic ability to be able to change on a dime from week to week spoke to how awesomely our operations performed.
Another differentiator is the sales career path for our reps. This offers four stages, and it’s also our technology and education roadmap. Reps can start with basic sales prospecting and closing skills with copiers, then expand into all of our different technologies. It’s a career path that really sets the stage for long-term success.
When COVID-19 struck, your dealership pivoted to offer clients a remote work strategy. Tell us about your experience in operating under these conditions.
Fraser: When Pennsylvania was hit on March 12, a Thursday, we made the decision to get everybody out of the office, and by Monday we had 90% of our people working remotely. Not long ago, we filled out a “Best Places to Work” application, and more than 140 employees took a survey, which had 18 questions based around COVID response. We had full documentation on how the company and leadership performed, and the feedback from our people was tremendous.
Last October, we had installed Microsoft Teams for some areas of operation. After COVID hit, Melissa came up with the idea of compensating sales reps just to set up Teams appointments with clients. They were vanilla-type appointments just to touch base with customers and provide them with some lessons learned in working remotely while addressing how we could help them out. But we soon realized we needed help communicating our value proposition, so Melissa worked with Kate Kingston to develop a talk track.
Confalone: Kate worked with us to develop our value proposition to promote KnowledgeWave, our online training program. We wanted to sell it as a service and felt it was a value to our clients. Kate showed us how to sell our technology bundles—monitors with 4K cameras and high-end voice for presenting remote videos or doing remote meeting rooms effectively. As a sales group, we needed to get much better at what we looked like on a monitor, and focus on areas such as lighting and sound. We became very good at doing videos, and as Heather (Trone, marketing manager) was a year into onboarding HubSpot for inbound marketing, we verticalized our videos and were pushing out marketing campaigns for sales leads on a weekly basis. We were prepared for it, and COVID steered us toward it.
You’ve built your Smart Office portfolio around a host of products and solutions, from MFPs to production/wide-format printers and managed services. Tell us a little about the evolution of the overall package.
Fraser: With a couple of exceptions, we have specialists involved with all of these products. We’re looking to our sales force to talk to the customer about the Smart Office and find opportunities where these specialists can come in and leverage their knowledge to drive the sale. The phone business has been one of our most successful and easiest rollouts, and the COVID crisis has taught us that people working remotely are not geared up from a phone standpoint. The telephony piece is going to drive us into the boardroom and the Smart Office concept that Sharp is promoting. As we get into all these different services and our knowledge continues to grow, the end game is to own all the technology in the office. This process will happen over the next two to three years, and we’re well positioned to make this happen. We’ve added a number of new partners, including Foxconn (through Sharp), Microsoft, Amazon and Google. It’s all about execution now. We don’t need too much more technology, we just need more ongoing training and learning to move ahead.
Your company launched Dark Web monitoring, supplemented by 15 lunch-and-learn sessions aimed at educating clients on the dangers of cyberattacks. How has it been received by clients?
Confalone: People can relate to it, especially on a personal level. It’s always top of mind when people get a suspicious call or a spam email. During COVID, people have been targeted by hackers at a much higher rate in the U.S. We’ve seen it with some of our clients. Our monitoring offering drew a lot of attention when we advertised it. People are curious, and want to know if their information is on the dark web.
How has COVID enabled you to take a deeper look into how you go to market?
Fraser: One of our recent hires came from a major manufacturer in the global services world. We felt this hire could help us with the packaging of different offerings that we have to make it more attractive going forward. Thanks to COVID, we’re about a third of the way in migrating our sales force over to the Smart Office services that we’re selling. Without COVID, we’re driving toward 20% growth like we had in the previous year and wouldn’t be talking about these other areas. But I think driving the Smart Office platform will make us even stronger as we come out of the COVID period.
Confalone: The good news is, we’re a large dealer and we were going after large accounts and gaining new business, which has helped us stay ahead of the curve. We effectively trained our salespeople on technology the last few years. Even when something like COVID happens, and it’s a relatively temporary event, it doesn’t change the fact that print is down. While we’ve been home, management has had the opportunity to look at how we’re going to market and what we should change when we come out of it. We’re going to come out of this as a stronger organization, leveraging opportunities to sell more products and more services.
Provide some insight regarding your move into unified communications with Smart Connect Unified Voice.
Confalone: I think it’s a great complement to what we have. I think our salespeople adopted the talk track easily, and there’s a great need for it. The amount of activity and number of leads we’ve generated are even higher than expected on a new product. It’s been a neglected area for many offices; most clients are still using generations-old systems from phone companies. We hired somebody a year ago who had 25 years’ experience in the space and he basically turned the program on for us.
Your dealership took the plunge into inbound marketing with HubSpot. How have the results been so far?
Fraser: It’s been very pivotal during the COVID period, especially now that we have this telephony bundle. It allows us to pull up 200 school districts in one minute, and in five minutes I can deliver our information out to clients and prospects. Previously, we never had access to this list; it was always in the CRM, and oftentimes the information wasn’t up to date or accurate.
Confalone: HubSpot provides the templates to build the campaign, the landing pages and the tracking of people; there’s a whole system behind it. When a HubSpot lead comes in, we can deliver the lead to one of our salespeople within an hour. That efficiency is amazing compared to our old lead-generation system. Previously, we were trying to track 50 salespeople with six different managers, where the leads were coming from and how they were getting those landing pages. You need to have a clean and organized database, which takes a lot of work. HubSpot really simplifies and enhances the process.
Loyalty has long been a hallmark of Fraser, with more than 25 employees logging 20-30 or more years on the job. What is the secret to keeping people happy?
Fraser: Our Total Rewards Programs is an indicator of how we retain employees and enjoy longevity among our ranks. We go all out to work with our employees and strive to help them attain their own personal growth. Any team member who’s customer-facing and gets any type of recognition or a positive write-up from that customer gets a Sack of Cash, which provides instant recognition and gratification. This applies to employees in service, admin, accounting—anyone who makes a positive impact on the customer experience. It sends them a “way to go” message, and we find it’s been really impactful.
Pierce: The Sacks of Cash program is effective and it’s helped us in a lot of different ways. It definitely has an impact on our Net Promoter Score and the number of surveys we get back from customers. Our employees encourage clients to fill out the surveys—our response rate is in the high teens—by letting them know we appreciate getting their honest feedback. We want the customer to know who they’re dealing with, and try to develop a personal relationship between them and team members.
Fraser: We have a program called Fraser Amazers that recognizes people who go above and beyond the call of duty. Last December on a Saturday, a team member drove an hour and a half each way to deliver toner to a major health care provider’s emergency room that had run out of toner. He dropped what he was doing on his off day to rectify the problem. None of the executives needed to get involved; our managers and team members take the initiative and get it done, and this is just one of the ways we recognize them to the entire team.
What was your dealership’s greatest accomplishment in 2019?
Confalone: We’re proud of our overall growth of 20%. We recognized all of our team members and managers for helping us get there. We celebrated that pretty significantly.
Fraser: We onboarded about 30 new employees. Finding talented people last year, and finding them in general, was a real challenge. It comes down to getting the right people who will either make or break you. We can outperform any of the direct branches; they just can’t compete with us. They can always give it away for less money, but when it comes to implementation, execution and deliverability, that whole closed-loop and functioning at a high level, the strategic agility…we’re tough to beat. There are many elements that came together that led to us having a great year.
What are your goals for the next 12-18 months?
Fraser: Our goal has always been centered on achieving 10% growth. We’re starting to talk about our budgeting and planning, not so much around a number, but determining what our structure is going to look like in all of these different product spaces, and how can we ramp them up to adapt in this environment. Using 10% as a benchmark, I can’t even project where we’re going to come in. We have a strong pipeline right now, and it’s changing every minute.
As the industry continues to contract and evolve, what will be the keys to success for the dealer community?
Fraser: We’ve done a decent number of acquisitions in the past, and that is still a viable outlet to growth. But we see tremendous opportunity in the Smart Office space, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of its potential. As a dealer, you’ve really got to understand your culture and what fits you in order to transition into newer types of offerings. And there’s something to be said for failing forward. Everyone fails at some point, but the secret to success is how quickly you can get up and try again.
What do you like most about your job?
Fraser: I like the challenge, the excitement. For me, it’s not about the dollars and cents. But I get a big thrill out of seeing our people grow and develop. A lot of team members have enjoyed tremendous careers here, and I find that exciting. Imagine being retired during the past five months, and going through all of the different things that can fill your time. That’s not for me. I find this work life pretty damn exciting.
Outside of work, what do you do for fun?
Fraser: My wife and I really like to travel. We were fortunate enough to visit Australia and New Zealand in January and February. We were scheduled to visit Portugal for our annual sales trip, but COVID had other ideas. Hopefully, we can take the team there next year. One of the nice things, because of the company’s growth over the last three or four years, is we’ve been able to visit Ireland, Greece and Italy. Our people have done a phenomenal job year in, year out, and it’s rewarding for me to see them have these experiences.
