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Gold/Mining/Energy : BCB VOICE SYSTEMS INC. (c.BIV) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: philipah who wrote (69)	3/20/1998 10:46:00 AM
From: Flora Wood	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 440

philipah - Let's look at your valid questions. What's going on in sales and marketing? Understand that some of this information is sensitive to competition and market regulation, but I'll tell you as much as I can. BCB has changed their marketing strategy fairly drastically in the last year. They examined their sales force of independent office equipment dealers and realized that the force was large, cumbersome and mostly an overhead burden. They cut this force dramatically and began looking for agreements with large distributers that could cover significant territory and would commit to quotas. The first result was the agreement with CLM in Atlanta, for exclusive distribution rights in 13 eastern US states. The balance of the US is covered by individual deals with 22 independent dealers - these agreements represent $3 million in minimum revenue commitments. Other efforts to seize large parts of the market include the integration with PC DOCS (VoiceDocs) allowing BCB to access the PC DOCS VAR network. Opportunities from this are beginning to surface - it's slow, but potentially meaningful. Is more development necessary? Yes, if I really understand the question - in a company like this, development will be ongoing. Don't forget that BCB is trying to infiltrate markets that are brand new - like the courtroom market for digital systems (currently virtually all analogue). Re: your point about gpm gains of a few percentage points being irrelevant ... over 10% is a very meaningful gain - yes, of course you want to see material sales increases but one of BCB's more salient characteristics is that their projected margins (on a product by product basis) could be quite competitive - example, products like Courtroom-DART and MURF, VoiceDOCS and NetBoard/ PC Talk fall in the 60% range. Believe me, I have as much interest as you do in seeing sustainable revenue increases - but at this point, all I see is that the technology seems to fulfill a market niche that competitors don't fill yet, it's cheap and flexible to deploy and it's won in competitive bids against giants like Dictaphone. Isn't that worth something? Flora