SCENARIO #1 (The perfect leveraged start into the direct response business)

Ken is an energetic and creative entrepreneur with a massive desire to succeed. He has a great new product that is perfect for direct response marketing. Through previous corporate experience, he knows how to put together a successful direct marketing campaign (to include a Web site.) He has some financial backing for product development but money is definitely tight. The question is "how do I create the infrastructure necessary to sell customers who respond with questions about my product, take customer orders, process orders, ship product and handle all the customer service issues?" There are two major problems here, one is cash. Ken simply doesn't have the money to contract for a facility, buy more office furniture, buy and install a phone system, establish an order processing capability through a bank, and hire and train operations personal. Two, (even if he had the money) he doesn't have the time or mental focus. His experience (and interest) is in developing ideas and marketing. The answer is to leverage into the capability.

Ken contacts Northwest Direct. The facilities, equipment, communications, computer systems and personnel are already in-place. He sends product samples and we conduct extensive training with our Reps. This includes the Reps using his product until they can fully understand and advocate its benefits. It is then a simple matter to channel his customers into the Northwest system. He then has a 100 percent fully functional, totally professional operations team in place and almost no cost. On top of that, his recurring costs for these services are fixed as a percentage of sales and are calculated to be less than in-house. In addition, if he has a delay in getting started, he is not stuck maintaining an operations team. If business slows for awhile, his operational costs drop proportionately. If he wants to leave the business, there are no lease termination issues or equipment to sell. Ken can just continue to do what he does best, develop new ideas and market them!

SCENARIO #2 (An established business needs temporary direct response support)

Rob owns a successful wholesale business. He has recently acquired a new product line for which he wants to create a distributor network. His plan is to conduct a direct marketing campaign for 90 days to sell inexpensive "Demo Kits." From this, the hope is that a series of new distributors can be established. The problem is that Rob is not set up to do a "retail type" order taking and fulfillment business (and it makes no sense to create one since the project is temporary.)

Rob contacts Northwest Direct. Within a few days, we are set up to process "Demo Kit" orders and fulfill them to the end customer. Rob wanted to handle customer inquiries in-house since his focus was on establishing distributor relationships rather than just selling products. Since the project was short term (only 90 days) he felt his Account Reps could handle what miscellaneous customer service actions came up. We simply process his "Demo Kit" orders and fulfill them to the customer. Rob doesn't have to spend a nickel on creating an order processing/fulfillment infrastructure. In this case, he pays for Northwest Direct's services through a small "per order" surcharge added to normal shipping and handling fees.

SCENARIO #3 (An established direct response business wants to move toward a "virtual corporation" business strategy.)

Frank owns a successful direct response business. However, he is massively tired of personnel problems, technical equipment difficulties, and the high cost of maintaining an under-utilized operations infrastructure during slow business periods. More importantly, the operational details are continually dragging him down. He no longer can focus efficiently on new product development and marketing. Frank is a smart businessman. He realizes that if he allows his marketing efforts to deteriorate, his business will die.

Frank contacts Northwest Direct. Although it is feasible to make a complete operational transition to Northwest Direct very quickly, he is reluctant to do so without being 100 percent certain they can do the job. Therefore, the next marketing project is structured to go to Northwest Direct rather than in-house. Of course, the new project was handled extremely well by Northwest Direct at a lower cost than he was doing it in-house. Frank then decided to transition over the remaining products and phase out his in-house system. In the end, Frank was able to completely focus on creating new products and marketing. Operations functions were handled entirely by Northwest Direct.