Audio for this transcript available
Transcription Services Provided by Verbal Ink
Announcer: What do Colleen Barrett and Carly Fiorina have in common? Well, they both started their careers as secretaries and they both ended up in top leadership positions of major corporations. And they have both been guests on the BusinessMakers Show. Check out their interviews at thebusinessmakers.com. And now back to the BusinessMakers Show with your host Russ Capper.
Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com. It's featured guest time on the show and I'm very pleased to have with me Carol Kurimsky, senior vice president of Brand Marketing with PC Mall. Carol, welcome to the BusinessMakers Show.
Carol: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Russ: You bet. Well, let's start here. Let's assume that we have somebody in our audience that has not heard of PC Mall. Tell them about the company.
Carol: Sure. So PC Mall is a direct marketer of technology products. We started out in 1987 in our founder's brother's apartment and -
Russ: Okay, not even his own apartment.
Carol: Not even his own apartment. I'm not sure how that quite worked. And so what happened was they were selling lots and they were going out and selling computers to people and they got kicked out of the apartment 'cause the UPS was dropping by too often.
Russ: Oh, my goodness. What a problem.
Carol: So that's a bad problem to have, right? So they ended up going out into their own location and over time they built the business up to a $1.3 billion business, which was amazing, and they went public and they're traded by NASDAQ, so we sell primarily to businesses actually of all sizes as well as some consumers.
Russ: Okay. How many employees are within the company today?
Carol: About, I think, 2,400.
Russ: Okay, so PC Mall selling to large and small businesses.
Carol: Correct.
Russ: Okay. And how do they sell? Is it like just online only?
Carol: Well, we sell online. We also sell through a direct sales force and we do all the classic marketing techniques you'd expect, email marketing and every other type of marketing you can imagine.
Russ: Okay, direct sales force. It seems so old-fashioned nowadays, but I love it. So how many salespeople are there out in the field?
Carol: We actually have about 400 people that work for PC Mall sales and then we have another group that works for SARCOM as well and then another probably about 50 that work for Mac Mall.
Russ: Okay, wow. And all of those are PC Mall companies.
Carol: All PC Mall companies.
Russ: Okay, very interesting. I have a little history in the PC world when it was growing up and I know some of the companies that PC Mall acquired and it's just fascinating. So you sell everything from CPUs, big displays, printers, parts, RAM, everything.
Carol: Everything. Anything that you need.
Russ: Okay. And you're probably totally platform agnostic.
Carol: Well, we sell everything and we are pretty much platform agnostic. We do sell a lot of Hewlett-Packard products. In fact, we are a full-line Hewlett-Packard reseller. We sell - about 20 percent of our business is HP and we also sell a lot of Apple products as well. We're a very large reseller for Apple.
Russ: Okay. Now you mentioned already Mac Mall, so PC Mall is at pcmall.com, but Mac Mall is separate at macmall.com.
Carol: That's right.
Russ: And you sell a lot of Mac products.
Carol: Absolutely, targeted towards the creative pros, creative designers and audio and video, different folks in the creative industry.
Russ: Okay, okay. It almost seems like Mac is really doing well these days. Do you actually see them taking over market share in large companies and small companies?
Carol: It's been very interesting to watch. Actually, we've seen companies of all sizes start to add Macs to their overall selection of PCs, not just for the people that are in the creative area, but also for everybody else, too, and they call it Add-a-Mac, but we're definitely seeing that there's more interest in - from general business about adding Macs to their portfolio. It still have a long way to go, though. The PCs are pretty predominant.
Russ: Okay. Now I just happen to know that you as vice president of Brand Marketing also are carrying this very important mission right now of being focused on small business, correct?
Carol: Absolutely.
Russ: Okay. And it's a new emphasis point with PC Mall, right?
Carol: Well, we've always sold to small business, but this is an area that we've really said the smallest of the businesses could use a little bit of extra help 'cause we work very closely with them and this is an opportunity for us to focus more on their needs.
Russ: Okay. Tell us how you're doing that.
Carol: Absolutely. So we formed something called the Small Business Network. It's an online community. It's really part Facebook with a social aspect to it where you can connect with other businesses like yourself as well as a resource center for small businesses, and so we have on this online community a number of different types of resources that'll target the different questions that small businesses are trying to answer.
Russ: Okay. And how do you answer those? Is it with written whitepapers and so forth or are there actually experts and people involved?
Carol: Both.
Russ: Okay. That seems to be the standard answer for PC Mall, all of the above.
Carol: It is. It is, all of the above. We cover it all. So what we do in the Small Business Network is we have - on the resource side we have a panel of experts. There's six experts. They're in marketing, sales, IT, business startup, digital signage and basically you can go out to these experts and type a question in. It'll go to them and then they'll go through the questions that come in and then they'll answer the ones that they find that will be most probably applicable and they'll post them all up on the Web, so it's kind of a Dear Abby but in, you know, business startup questions or business questions, which is kind of interesting.
Russ: Okay, real cool.
Carol: And we even have our knowledge bank. It's a great, in-depth resource where people can go in and we have almost 200 whitepapers in there. They cover things like marketing, sales, IT, business startup issues, HR, all the questions that small businesses have when they start up a business.
Russ: Now do you have to be a PC Mall customer in order to have access to the network?
Carol: No. You can be - any small business can be a member in the U.S. You have to be in the U.S.
Russ: Okay. And does it cost anything?
Carol: No, it's totally free.
Russ: Okay, so it's all in this sorta community world that PC Mall is hoping to gather loyalty from the Small Business Network and they'll come there for expertise and for products as well.
Carol: Absolutely. So we have in there a store. We took our PC Mall store that we had, pcmall.com, and we put it inside the Small Business Network and we gave people discounts, so it's actually - if you go to the Small Business Network you can go into the SBN store and you can get the products actually at a discount, but being an SBN member is kind of a volume purchase opportunity for small business.
Russ: Well, I - you know, just going back to this direct sales thing, I expected that you probably had volume procurement agreements with these large companies that bought thousands and thousands of items at one time, so what you're saying is that you've brought that all the way down to the Small Business Network.
Carol: Absolutely. Absolutely. This is their opportunity to combine their purchasing power together and benefit from it.
Russ: Okay. Now let's say that we have somebody listening right now or watching right now that's going, "Wait a minute. I need to know about it." How do they find Small Business Network?
Carol: They would find it by going to pcmallsbn.com, so www.pcmallsbn.com.
Russ: Okay. And it's very easy from that point forward?
Carol: Absolutely. You just sign up and you register and then we'll send you an activation email like all the networks do and you click, you enter, you're there.
Russ: Now I sorta detect that you kind of enjoy this SBN initiative.
Carol: I absolutely do. This was a lot of fun for me.
Russ: Okay. But you've always sorta been in the space, right, of selling products in high volumes.
Carol: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Russ: And so this is the first opportunity you've had to build a network around a targeted group?
Carol: This is the first opportunity I've had to build a social network from scratch. I've done some social networking before that was smaller, but this is really targeted towards a bigger audience and it's from scratch, so I'm just enjoying it. It's great. It's cutting edge.
Russ: Cool. Carol, I really appreciate you sharing this with us.
Carol: Well, thank you and thanks for having me.
Russ: You bet. That's Carol Kurimsky, senior vice president of Brand Marketing with PC Mall. And you're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at thebusinessmakers.com.