Marketing Services

Support Services: Rollie Froehlig, National Fulfillment

1 Aug, 2002 By: Thomas Haire Response

---

Rollie Froehlig is president and founder of National Fulfillment, a full-service fulfillment, distribution and packaging company located in Nashville, Tenn. Recently, Response was fortunate enough to sit down and chat with Froehlig about his experiences in the industry.

 

Response: How did you get your start in the business?

Rollie Froehlig: I've been involved in fulfillment since 1966. I started out in New York, where I was until 1985, when I moved to Nashville and started my own business, National Fulfillment. Now, we're one of the two largest fulfillment houses in America. We do everything a house can do in-house - customer service sales, enhanced services, pick-and-pack, everything. We have a half-million square feet of space and 280 employees.

 

 

Response: We've heard quite a bit about a new service you're providing called "inquiry conversion." Can you describe what the service does?

Froehlig: National has a reputation for coming up with new ideas - everything from bundled service pricing to charge-back retrieval. And inquiry conversion follows in that tradition as our hottest new service. What the program does is this: when a marketer puts a DRTV ad on the air, it generates a certain number of calls. We find usually half of those calls turn into orders. With our inquiry conversion program, which uses specialized scripts designed to turn mere product inquiries into sales, we've been able to take non-order calls and convert about 40 percent of those into sales. Simple math tells you this takes your total sales rate from 50 percent of callers to 70 percent. We also have save-the-sale and credit card decline conversion programs that help boost our clients' bottom lines.

 

 

Response: Can you tell us about some of your top clients?

Froehlig: In DRTV, we work with players like Emson, Buckhead Marketing, One World, Allied, MSG, MSS and Rotozip. Among brand marketers, our clients include, or have included, Coca-Cola, Eureka and Hoover vacuums, Ralston-Purina, Dell Computers and Universal Studios. We do not sign contracts with our clients. I don't believe a client contract will keep companies in business with us - the quality of the work we do will keep clients. We have to stay on top of the business and be flexible.

 

 

Response: Is there anything in the works to expand National's scope?

Froehlig: We recently opened a sister company here in our building called Entertainment America. It's a provider of 800-number services, and it also serves as brokerage house for 800-number companies and merchant services.

 

Bookmark it: digg del.icio.us technorati yahoo facebook twitter