Sales Call!
Dispatches from Wendy Newsham, Director of Institutional Sales and Business Development
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My bag is (mostly) unpacked from my trip to Glasgow to attend UKSG last week, but the trip made me think a lot about our company’s global footprint. The editor of this newsletter had prompted before I left, telling me to think up a good topic for my column and get it started while I was gone, so I suppose it was somewhat natural that I’d think about our connections around the world. During UKSG I took a minute to think about how amazing it is that I had meetings with librarians from Austria, Germany, Denmark, Norway, and of course, various locations around the UK. We attend conferences throughout the year, some of them I attend myself or with colleagues, while we are represented at others by representative agents. So while we are located in New Rochelle, New York, USA, we are, in fact, an international company with subscribers in more than 170 countries and publishing research from just as many. Our focus and our business are truly global in every way.
One of my roles as the Director of Sales and Business Development is to manage our relationship with Research4Life, the health research program HINARI, as well as INASP, to provide access to our critical scientific research publications free of charge to developing nations in every corner of the world. My favorite meeting at UKSG was with a group of three librarians from an INASP institution in Africa that is, for the first time, moving away from free access to managing subscriptions with their own funds. They are an incredible success story and a model that proves why it’s so important to participate in these organizations.
While we have partnered with institutions around the world to provide subscription access to our content for many years, I am now working to strengthen our presence in areas such as Australia, where I am actively seeking to hire a dedicated sales representative. I’m working towards adding dedicated representation in the UK as well—each of these additions would be managed in concert with our fantastic partners, Burgundy Services, who manage our representation in the UK, Europe, Turkey, South Africa, and Australia. Establishing dedicated representation in these critical areas will help us work with the libraries in a manner more akin to the way we work with the US institutions—a partnership for both dissemination of research and access to published content.
In other regions we are represented by carefully selected partners:
- Latin America and South America—Publishers Communication Group (PCG)
- India—Publishers Communication Group (PCG)
- Middle East and North Africa—ACCUCOMS
- Far East—ACCUCOMS
- South Korea—EBSCO
- Japan—Bureau Hosoya
- China—Charlesworth
Our US accounts are managed by our own dedicated professional sales force—all of whom are based in the Northeast corridor and attend the US library meetings throughout the year.
Our global reach via our in-house representation and our agency partners is critical to the essential research we publish being presented to librarians in institutions, hospitals, corporations, and research organizations around the world. It’s exciting to know that research is submitted from scientists in China, and read by others in Brazil, or submitted from Turkey and read in California—and that we are a pipeline through which valuable knowledge flows.
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