Initially, the partners had just three
employees. Between October 2001 and the end of the year, they added six
salespeople. By the company's first anniversary, Ocular Group had grown to a
family of 23, expanding its facilities to accommodate a burgeoning support and
administrative staff. "We're in the same building that we started in, but we've
doubled our space in it," Heimerdinger says.
Five Heads are Better Than
One
Ocular Group's corporate structure is as exceptional as its rapid growth. The five partners own the company equally. "We're 20 percent partners across the board," Schultz explains. "We've had a business relationship for some time. The goals we've achieved so far, we've achieved together, so we've stayed together."
Five heads, the partners believe, are much better than one. Everybody brings something different to the mix, Fuller says. "Jeff comes more from an executive manufacturing background, Ron tends to be very creative in his approaches, Gregg has an overall area of expertise," Fuller says. "Like the Chicago Bulls, some play better defense, some take the rebounds. We put it together for each and every account. And as long as the team is winning, everybody wins."
When Ocular Group calls on accounts, it does so in teams assembled to fit the needs of each client. "Who we take in to a sales situation reflects the circumstances and the complexity," Heimerdinger says. For example, four of the distributorship's employees specialize in internet solutions, while others have extensive backgrounds in color work. "A lot of people in our business are forms people, or they're label people, or they're envelope people," Heimerdinger says. "But our clients are looking for all kinds of graphic-based solutions, including design solutions and web solutions. You need to have the whole variety."
More distributorships are learning to sell a broad range of products and services because "you can't be a specialist anymore and survive," Fuller says. "There are distributors that focus on labels, for example, but if you can't develop that relationship past a particular product, you're in trouble."
No one can be all things to all people, however. Working collectively gives Ocular Group--and their customers--an edge, according to Heimerdinger. "The team-selling approach differentiates us," he says. "It creates an educational pool. We all have an opportunity to learn that's not at the expense of a particular client or a particular job. We feel we provide much more efficiency to our customers and we can provide better solutions."
Helping Clients Realize Their Visions
Ocular Group looks closely at issues and circumstances causing or underlying business problems. "Everybody is going to get to a price per thousand," Heimerdinger says. "[The key] is applying the knowledge to interpret when something might go wrong, to anticipate and solve problems for our clients."
The problem of one client, a homebuilder in the Chicago area, was a large inventory of obsolete print materials. "If we were offering a product-based solution, we would just give them a price on a lesser quantity," Heimerdinger explains. While learning more about how the client did business, though, Ocular Group's team found that the problem stemmed from the fact that the builder was working in multiple locations. The print materials for each municipality required different information.
"Instead of an offset solution, we recommended a digital solution to provide them with the flexibility they needed," Heimerdinger says. "By asking a few more questions as to what they were actually trying to accomplish, we were able to do more than provide print materials. We were able to solve a problem."
Ocular Group approaches customers on three different levels, becoming acquainted with each one's organizational, departmental and personal goals. "That enables us to be very specific in helping our customers realize their visions," Heimerdinger says, "instead of just talking to them about what they're buying, how many they're buying and what price they're paying. Those are all product-based questions."
As clients' needs change, so does the team. "We worked this spring with a direct-selling organization [specializing in home goods] that was putting on a large trade show," Heimerdinger says. "To try to be the one supplier for everything they needed, we used a variety of approaches. We needed to look at an internet solution, creative marketing ideas and product selection. They wanted to provide new uniforms for all their specialists in the field, and we needed to come back with hard samples, not just a catalog."
Spearheading that effort was one of Ocular Group's partners, who was the account lead and a project manager described by Heimerdinger as "kind of the air traffic controller." After the trade show, the distributorship had a follow-up meeting with the client. "Only two of our people needed to be involved in that," he says.
New Directions, But No Stars
End users are demanding a wider variety of solutions. Often, these solutions are electronic. "You have to offer a lot more than print," Fuller says. "You need creative services, graphic design, e-commerce and web design."
Much of Ocular Group's direct marketing is electronic-based, Schultz says. "We don't pitch a client without focusing on electronic media," he says. "The new technology is becoming more important to us." Interactive CD-ROM applications and videos, he says, now serve functions traditionally covered by brochures and other print materials. These are becoming the new sales tools for many of Ocular Group's clients. "If we don't introduce the new technology to our clients," Schultz says, "someone else will."
Ocular Group's clients come in all sizes, from a local clothing store to a large insurance company. The group has developed a niche in the casino industry, capitalizing on Schultz' understanding of that business. He estimates that casinos comprise 25 percent of the distributorship's sales.
Ocular Group's team-selling structure makes each client, no matter its size, an account of the distributorship, not any individual. "Nobody cares if they have this account or that account," Fuller says, expressing the company's "no stars" philosophy.
Salespeople have the opportunity to join the firmament as partners once they reach a certain level of gross profit contribution, Heimerdinger says. "I think that's one of the reasons we've been able to grow so quickly," he says.
Partners concentrate on establishing new business. "Our goal now is to focus on the Fortune 500 companies in the Chicago area," Schulz says. As they secure new business, they turn over implementation to a project manager or customer service representative. A salesperson becomes the account lead.
"Ocular Group means vision to see exactly what you need," reads the company's web site. "When we chose our name, my wife thought that we were starting a vision clinic," jokes Heimerdinger.
In a way, they were.
