Catalog Consolidation Sparks Sales Jump
A two-year effort to consolidate 11 catalogs into one book is paying dividends for a provider of electrical and electronic connectors for engineers in the industrial, commercial and military sectors.The catalog, which launched in January, contains about 200 pages. The combined page count of the books it replaced was 500 to 1,000.
"This is meant to be a solutions guide that is designed to make it easy for customers who had to use multiple catalogs with information scattered across the board," said Kent Carlson, an application engineer at PEI-Genesis, Philadelphia. "We did this so a customer can go to one place and get all the information they need, including assembly instructions and service instructions."
PEI-Genesis is an assembling distributor for Amphenol Industrial Operations, and most of the products in the book are obtained from Amphenol.
"This has helped us increase our sales," said Carlson, though he didn't provide specific results. "We're well ahead of last year's trend, and we're Amphenol's fastest-growing distributor."
No prospect or house list mailings are used.
"We view that as a waste," he said.
The company is mailing it to about 1,000 requesters per month. The print run for the new book was 20,000. Its outside sales force is using it as part of its efforts.
"This helps us coordinate our sales efforts, and another issue it addresses is that we don't have to spend as much sending multiple books with different connectors," he said.
