Exploring The Account Rep's Role

Circulation Management, Jan 1, 2004

Byline: CAROLE IRELAND

THIRTY YEARS AGO, when I started in magazine circulation at a small publishing company in Pittsfield, Ma., the publication I worked for had just moved to an outside service bureau, Systemetrics. All mail came to our office, and since this was a large controlled publication, there was a lot of mail - at peak times 30 to 40 trays a day.

My staff and I coded all incoming documents for demographics and for paragraphs 3B and 3C (qual source and mailing address). For new readers, we manually deduped each prospect against a galley of the file - and with a file of 200,000 this was no small task. We then batched all our work, prepared batch headers and transmittals, and shipped everything to Systemetrics, where the data was entered. Systemetrics prepared reports, ran counts and produced mailing labels, but not much more.

As they say, times have changed. The technology employed by service bureaus today has increased their capacity to handle publishers' ever-growing needs and demands. Most circulation managers today have online access to their vendor's system which enables them to get flash counts, see where their incoming mail is in the front-end process, download reports, do their own list rentals and selects - and more. Years ago it took three days and a programmer to get basic counts; now a circ manager can obtain instant counts from his/her desk.

One thing hasn't changed over the years - the importance of the account rep. Thirty years ago I was on the phone with my AR at Systemetics, daily - sometimes several times a day. Ray was the link to my file and the mysterious inner workings of the fulfillment operation.

The chart in this issue of Circulation Management shows the number of account reps each service bureau employs, but as we all know, raw figures cannot provide a three-dimensional picture. During my years as a consultant, I have seen how the role of AR varies from vendor to vendor. This insight, and a comment from a vendor at the Western Fulfillment Management Association in LA last September, marked the start of this deeper look at the role of a service bureau's account rep.

In preparation for this article, Barbara Love and I spoke with several fulfillment service bureaus. I have chosen to not mention vendors' names in this article. The promise of anonymity made it possible for these individuals to speak more freely. I carefully selected a mix of vendors, large and small, those that focus on B2B and those vendors that tend to focus on consumer titles.

Every vendor recognizes the key role of the account rep, who is the main interface between the vendor and the client, but there are interesting differences as to functions contained within the AR role. Today's technology has made it possible for some vendors to provide their ARs with tools so they can handle all aspects for 90% to 95% of every request that comes to them from the circulation manager - scheduling, queries, table updates, policy changes, setting up new titles, etc.

Not too many years ago, most of these tasks required programmers. In this environment, the AR handles the orders sent to them by the circulation manager - or as one vendor's spokesperson said, "Our ARs are not order takers, they execute the orders." Programmers are involved only with very complex orders and requests that require system changes. The challenge in this environment is to fill the AR slots with people who are comfortable with technology and who also have good people skills.

The flip side to this one-person-does-all philosophy is the vendor who uses the AR as the conduit from the circulation manager to a more technically-oriented group within the company. It is this group who pulls the lists, updates the tables and runs the various jobs. In this environment, the AR "integrates" rather than executes jobs. According to one vendor, "Our AR's focus is on the business relationship - on achieving a higher level of communication with the CM and understanding his/her goals."

Both approaches work. More ARs are needed in companies where the AR does it all, but even in the environment where the AR passes the actual jobs on to others, the number of publications an AR can handle is finite. In 1991 (the first year Circulation Management produced this analysis) ARs were handling an average of 9.7 titles. According to this year's stats ARs now average 6.7 titles, an indication that vendors realize that stretching an Account Rep too thin jeopardizes his/her effectiveness.

There is a greater division of responsibilities - not surprisingly - at larger vendors. The AR is the primary contact, but within the AR department there may be a group who focuses on audits, or conversions, or the financial reconciliations. One large vendor has multi levels from the department head, to the group AR, to the AR, to the assistant AR, followed by the production team who supports this group. At the opposite extreme, there are some small vendors where the president of the company may be acting as an account rep as well as running the business.