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Pelco teams with Northern to move Select Goods

Pelco teams with Northern to move Select Goods

CLOVIS, Calif.—Installers and integrators looking to capitalize on the Pelco brand, but spend a little less, have a new option thanks to a deal Pelco has struck with distributor Northern Video. Pelco “Select Goods,” comprising discontinued and refurbished Pelco products, will be available through Northern at “a substantial savings” to factory new products, but still carry Pelco's full factory warranty.

“We've had 'Select Goods' forever,” said John Dolan, vice president of strategic accounts at Pelco, “and every company does. You've got model 123, and it gets revised to model 123a, and as soon as they learn about that, no one wants 123 anymore. So how do you get them off the shelf?” He said Pelco's inside sales people are very good at taking orders and customer service, “but they're not outbound telemarketers ... So we had two choices: one to put resources in place here in the office to do this kind of outbound sales, something we're not good at and don't do, or have someone like Northern do it.”

Dolan said Northern Video wanted to build a program around the Select Goods, and that the company has a great relationship with its customers and is known for it's outbound-sales approach.

Dolan cautioned, however, that “there isn't just an infinite volume of these goods that will flow through Northern Video. There are months where we have very few items or almost none that wind up in this category, and then there's periods where there might be various products that end up in this pool ... There might be a DVR this week, and then none of that for seven weeks after that.” He also noted that the “refurbished” products are not actually used products, but generally products that were originally built one way, but then changed because of a component failure from a specific vendor or because of an overstock that led to a slight change and a new part number. All of them, he said, look like new, from the box they're shipped in to the manuals that accompany them.

So why do this now? The answer is fairly obvious: “When times are great, we don't focus on this as much,” Dolan said. “You think, 'someday we'll work on getting around to that.' But with the economy a little tighter, dealers looking at the bottom line a little closer, but also the distributors are getting a lot more creative.”

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