Difference Makers - Marking Pros

Founded by George “Doc Thunder” Reed 40 years ago, Marketing Professionals is taking care of business in a flash. As president of the company, Pete Daley is bringing it into 2019 with the same dedication and perseverance on which the business was founded.

WORDS BY JAMIE SORCHER

Call it karma how Pete Daley happened into a car audio career. As part of Marketing Professionals, Inc. for the last 12 years, he has held the reins as president of the company for the last five, but it could have gone much differently.

Born and raised in Chicago, Daley moved to Texas in 1988. “When I got my first vehicle, I was a DIY guy and had a really nice install in my truck,” he said. “I was buying Rockford, my first radio was an Alpine, and I had Boston Acoustic speakers.

“I got offered a job for this new company and went to fill out the application. When I drove up, my stereo was on—not super loud, but moderate—and there was this guy smoking a cigarette outside the store that I was potentially going to work for. He started asking me questions and then he told me he wanted to hire me. I said, ‘No, I’m here to fill out an application because this other person wants to hire me.’ He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it.’”

As it turns out, the company Daley ultimately went to work for was Incredible Universe, a Tandy company. “The store didn’t even have a name at the time,” Daley said. “It was just a project [conceived by Tandy’s CEO John Roach]. So, here I was, 17 years old, and before we even opened, the store manager left and went back to his old job. They were looking for a store manager so I threw my name in the hat and ultimately did six million a year in our car audio/cell phone department for the three or four years that I was there. I’ve been doing this ever since.”

Straight Shooters With a Narrow Focus

Marketing Pros covers Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas and carries just a few select lines.

“We’re very narrow,” Daley said. “When I first started, we had 14 different factories. We weren’t very important to all of them. It was small checks here and there. Now we push our retailers to be important to their vendors. They should not be that diversified. So, that being said, we only have three vendors. Currently we have Kicker, Metra and Orca [Focal, Mosconi and Illusion.]”

One of the company’s core values is about face time. “It’s about getting out there and traveling to better understand the environments our retailers are selling to and who their customers are so we can figure out our fit and how we can support them.”

Accountability is another tenet of the rep firm. “You’ve got to fall on the sword,” Daley said. “If you screw up, then you screwed up. You have to make sure you take care of it. Having everyone’s best

interests involved is important. We’re the middle man between the retailers and the vendors. We need to make sure that everybody is taken care of appropriately. We need orders for the vendors and customer service and product reliability for the retailers. We have to be that buffer. Sometimes the vendor isn’t the nicest vendor and sometimes the retailer isn’t the nicest retailer. We have to be there to buffer that.”

Traveling to Connect In-Person With Retailers

What differentiates Marketing Pros from other rep firms, according to Daley, is a key business practice the company upholds. “It goes back to travel,” he said. “A lot of rep firms are really just telemarketers. They’re not traveling. Our rep firm does upwards of 150 sales stops a month—either overnight stays or day trips—but it means we’re engaged with our retailers during the good months of the year and the bad months of the year.’

The firm pays for the reps to travel, Daley said. “By paying for their hotels and paying for their fuel, it means that sales don’t have to be up for them to get their butts out there in the field,” he explained. “When sales are up, they still need to be out in the field. So no matter what, the benefit of Marketing Pros is that we travel. The drawback of Marketing Pros…is that we travel.”

Marketing Pros Inc. Roster

George Reed: The legendary “Doc Thunder,” founder of Marketing Pros (1979), and Lifetime Achievement award winner for MEA in 2017. Reed’s long-time commitment of traveling to service the company’s partners and provide stellar customer service has taught the team how to have long-term success as a field rep.

Reps

Kevin Knox: His strong technical knowledge, along with his prior experience in retail store management and organizational skills, has earned Knox the respect of his retail partners. The firm is excited to have him back for his second tour with Marketing Pros. Servicing out of New Orleans.

Jim Wehling: One of the strongest field reps in the country, Wehling’s attention to detail and killer customer service separates him from all others. With one of the largest population bases in the firm’s territory, his hands are full. He has been with Marketing Pros for over five years and is based out of San Antonio.

Mike Penny: Penny’s deep relations with his retail partners, and his vigor to travel to see every major account in his region monthly, keeps him at the top of the list to do business with. His consistent travel in Oklahoma and Arkansas keeps him busy in the hardest Marketing Pros region. Mike has been with Marketing Pros for 16 years and is servicing the region out of Oklahoma City.

Pete Daley: He started 12 years ago and has evolved to running Marketing Pros as president for the past five years. His technical knowledge separates him from the competition. Daley is based out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Administrative Staff

Kristin Daley: Since 2015, Daley handles most of the backstage accounting for data entry into the Rep Firm Software used to compile reporting and sales numbers. Pete Daley is her husband of over 25 years.

Stephanie Reed: Reed handles almost exclusively the commissions in the Rep Firm Software. She resides near George Reed, and helps with extra administrative projects when they arise.

George “Doc Thunder” Reed founded Marketing Professionals Inc. in 1979. Reed’s long-time commitment of traveling to service the firm’s partners and offering extreme customer service for all is what sets him apart.

Another area that sets Marketing Pros apart from many other rep firms, according to Daley, is its commitment to call reports. “Everybody hates paperwork and it’s a pain in the ass, but call reports allow us to plan out our week, our sales day and our sales stops,” Daley said. “It means we have an agenda. It might be

promotions, a follow-up from a previous call report, service items we need to take care of, or policy changes, but at least we have an agenda. We have a script to follow which is our organizer that we use. We take elaborate notes because with as many stops as we do, it can be hard to remember everything by the time you get back to the office.”

A Strong Belief in Surviving and Thriving

On office days, the file folders come out along with the organizers. “Then we’re able to follow up on those action items,” Daley said. “Most people don’t do call reports because it adds so many layers of work. However, if there is a discrepancy from the vendor or with a retailer, we have notes to document it.”

Above all, Daley appreciates what it takes to build a business. “The retailers and vendors are our partners,” he said. “We live and die by them all doing well. As a rep firm we try to help the retailers achieve success. It could be by guiding them to the SKUs that they need to buy or maybe we’re teaching them how to be better fabricators, tuners or installers. One of the reasons we have been successful and won the Mobile Electronics award [Rep Firm of The Year 2014-2018] is that we are engaged. The retailers we service are loyal to us and believe in us. I use that word—believe—a lot but it’s true. You’ve gotta believe. As much as we have these negative individuals who worry

Pete Daley joined Marketing Pros 12 years ago and has evolved to running the company as president for the past five years. He is a contributor for MECP study guides, and a proctor for them as well.

about the Internet or Amazon, it’s about self-preservation. It’s our job to make sure that each one of our retailers is successful, survives and thrives.”

To Work With Marketing Pros, Retailers Must Want to Evolve

For vendors who want to work with Marketing Pros there is some criteria to meet.

“We have had many lines over the years and honesty is important,” Daley said. “That means good or bad. It might be ‘Hey, we’re having some inventory problems,’ or ‘We have to increase pricing,’ but no matter what, we need honesty. I’ll use Orca as an example, but Kicker falls into that category as well. Once we get onboard with honesty, you start feeling like a family. When you feel like family, you want to work harder for that family.”

Retailers, too, need to come to the table with something to work with Marketing Pros—basically just one essential. “First and foremost, we truly believe that we have the best vendors in the market, so if a retailer wants to be part of the best team, they have to do their part to make it so,” Daley said. “Retailers have the power because they have a lot of choices. The only prerequisite is that they’re willing to learn. They have to be willing to adapt.”

The standards for success, Daley added, include inventorying product and demonstrating it, while aptitude is needed in the back of the house as well as in the front. “They have to want to evolve. It’s not going to be an ’84 Cutlass showing up every day. You might get an ’18 Dodge Ram with a fancy integrated data system that needs to be reckoned with in order to have a decent, successful sale,” Daley said. “The mistake so many guys make today is thinking that if they sell the high-end of everything—amps and speakers—that it’s going to sound good.” But this might not be the case, he added.

“It’s like a recipe. You can have the best ingredients, but if you overcook it, undercook it, under-season or over-season, it’s not going to taste its best. We have to figure out with our retailers what kind of chef each one of them is, so we can help them have a good result every time.”

Trainings, Events and the Coming Year

With some major changes in the marketplace over the last few years, Marketing Pros made the decision to not be a stocking rep. “We used to be back in the eighties,” Daley said. “But every stocking rep firm in our four states has gone out of business. We have had at least five go out of business and some distributors. In the smaller markets, it can be successful. In the larger markets, it’s not.”

Daley estimated the firm services a population of about 40 million in its territory. “As you go into the MINK states, there isn’t a lot there. Just-in-time inventory is important to those guys. If you stock, then the other issue is you also become a competitor to the distributors,” Daley said. “Kicker is based out of Stillwater, Oklahoma and Metra has a warehouse here in Dallas, so of our three vendors we have two supply chains that are in close proximity. Orca is the only that is three days out for us but most of our retailers can manage that.”

When it comes to trainings, events and other support, Marketing Pros offers a full complement. “A few of us are very technical with events,” Daley said. “I used to do 15 to 20 trainings a year, but it has been reduced since I began managing the company. I was doing the whole thing— pulling out the temporary projector screen—but it was all about sales training, no product.”

Product trainings, however, are done quite often. “We do 40 or 50 trainings and events a year,” Daley said. “There are more of them during the warmer seasons—tent sales, Heat Wave custom car shows, and the Lone Star Throwdown [truck show]. Obviously, we have KnowledgeFest in our backyard, too.”

At the end of the day, Daley summed it up like this: “If you’re not learning, you’re dying,” he said. “So if retailers are unwilling to get the training or unwilling to attend the training—whether it’s at a remote site or at their store—those retailers that fight it are the ones that traditionally struggle.” Those who attend events, he said, whether it’s a training or an event like KnowledgeFest, will understand.

“When you’re with a group of retailers and installers who all want to be better, you start to feel like that, too. Training is super important, but when we go out in the field, we do mini trainings all the time,” he said. “If we have a new amplifier from Kicker, we’ll get out there with the sales sample and do a mini training. It may only be this product that we’re talking about, but it still happens.”

Unfortunately, Daley said, the retailers who want the quality trainings are just a small percentage of the entire retailer base. “It may be that just five to 10 percent of the retailers out there truly understand,” Daley said. “The rest of them are just trying to move boxes. I get that, because my job is to move my vendors’ boxes to my retailers’ stores, so I understand—but sometimes the stores just don’t have the passion to be in the industry. To some it’s just a job.”

As Marketing Pros heads into 2019 with Daley at the helm, it seemed like a good time to ask him to name a New Year’s resolution. He said, “I would love to have George Reed retire. He is the one who taught me how to be a good sales rep. Now you can be a good salesman, but it doesn’t mean you’re a good sales rep. And just because you’re a good sales rep, it doesn’t mean you’re a good manager. George is sick and of the age to really enjoy his time. It would be special. Will it happen in the next six months? The answer is no. Everybody knows George. He is super stubborn so he will ride it out. I have always told him, of course, that I want him in the picture as long as possible. But he got us here.”

Pete Daley and George Reed pose at KnowledgeFest with Kevin Knox, Jim Wehling, and Chris Cook of MEA.