MI Pro

For over 30 years Peavey has been a backbone supplier for Britain’s independent music shops and recently it has quietly undergone some major structural changes. Though these won’t have gone unnoticed by Peavey customers, there is a story for retailers that aren’t currently in the Peavey fold.  I set out to ask Peavey’s UK and Ireland sales manager, Dave Hunt, just what has been going on at the company and what it will mean for their dealers.

You expect a salesman, especially the manager of a major suppliers UK sales team, to be articulate and on the ball, but just a few minutes speaking with Hunt reveals not just a salesman’s easy manner and ready answer, but a keen sense of the seismic changes taking place in the industry and a refreshing willingness to admit that things haven’t always been perfect. This is a strength and, no doubt, contributed to the analysis that MD Clive Roberts and his team undertook before deciding, in effect, to completely rethink the way Peavey is sold to the trade in the UK.

Hunt had extensive experience in the industry before he came to the firm. “I joined Peavey in February 2004. Beforehand I’d been working as a freelance sponsorship agent in sport and music – effectively taking a nine-year sabbatical outside the industry.

“But prior to that I was sales manager at Trace Elliot, during the time Clive Roberts was at the company. That was from 1993 to ‘96, when it was Trace Elliot Distribution, owned by Kaman, doing not just Trace Elliot, but Ovation and many other products as well. Even further back, I was with American Percussion, which became Active Distribution and before that I was working with Impact Percussion. 

“I’d kept in touch with Clive on a social level and also Paul Stevens, Trace’s designer, so when Clive contacted me saying he had an opening in sales in the London area, I knew the people I’d be working with.”

He goes on to tell us what led to the decision to recreate the Peavey sales team: “Peavey has had major representation in the UK since Hartley Peavey’s acquisition of the original distributor in the early ‘80s and as the team was diminished due to several factors, including retirement, the decision was made to not just replace, but to increase its UK representation.

“We also had to consider the way Peavey itself had changed too, not least by taking over other companies, like Trace Elliot, but also by side-stepping into new areas such as software, modelling amplifiers and line array systems to name just a few. That meant the range of products being offered was getting larger, so our dealer profile was changing and we needed to emphasise those changes and not just with the people who have been dealing with us for over 35 years. We also needed a sales team that was out there knocking on other people’s doors, too.”

This latter consideration comes at an important time for the industry. As the pressure on retailers to make decent margins grows and as discounters become ever more desperate, having a stable line of ‘big brand’, reliable products which aren’t being discounted into the ground starts to look increasingly attractive. Indeed, word on the street suggests that Peavey has been gaining momentum in recent months and Hunt confirms that the company is enjoying a renaissance of interest from retailers looking to find a strong supplier whose products they can make a living from selling.

There is, it has to be said, another reason why Peavey needed to make some changes to the way it presented itself. Much liked in the industry it may be, but it has been hard to escape the feeling that Peavey had gone just a little off the boil in recent years. Dave Hunt has his own thoughts on the matter: “There has been some complacency in the past. I think we had got to the point where Peavey had its own group of loyal followers, which was fine, they’d order lots of Peavey, but we had to adapt our sales focus so as to take the company into the next phase. Call that survival, call it corporate development, but it had to be done.”

Hunt says that the idea to change came from both the UK team and Meridian, but particularly from Clive Roberts. “It’s been said before that Clive has put a very different stamp on Peavey and it hasn’t happened overnight. We started talking about doing this in the autumn of 2007 and it takes a long time with a big animal like Peavey to get that amount of movement. From my point of view it was about creating a coherent team of people who would go out and say ‘Yes, I’m from Peavey and we are going to look after you and call on you every month and this is what we will do’.”

SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Another aspect of the Peavey operation here that needed sharpening, Hunt accepts, is the actual supply of products. A combination of increased demand compounded by inevitable China sourcing issues has resulted, according to word on the street, in shortages in some cases.

We had our fair share of supply issues as have many of our friendly competitors, mainly as a result of taking more and more products to China, but we have improved this situation by streamlining and extending our forecasting system and by increasing our presence in China – we are now seeing very encouraging results.”

Of course, having taken the decision to, in effect, start again with a new sales team, Peavey then had to go about assembling it. Hunt explains what they did next: “We started with an advert in MI Pro and with that, plus word of mouth, we had something like 56 applications. We narrowed that down, saw a number of people, and those we’ve appointed have all come to us with varying levels of experience, each bringing something different to the team.

“We were looking for people with tenacity and initiative to go out and do it. More than in any other business, in this industry you’re talking to people where the till in front of them and the desk it stands on are owned by them – they own and depend on the business; they’re not just buyers working for someone else. So we were looking for people who were sympathetic to sole traders and able to represent what Peavey is all about – which is producing good value products across the range and making the dealers profit. That has been a cornerstone to Peavey over the years. If you ask companies, especially some of the bigger players, what they make the most money on, they will tell you it’s Peavey.”

Many firms have faced the discounting problem. If you ask around, the consensus among retailers does appear to be, as Hunt suggests, that Peavey doesn’t suffer as much as some of, say, the big Japanese brands. “We’ve been fortunate in that common sense has prevailed,” he comments. “I would say that part of that may have been because we probably have less than half the number of dealers that some other brands have, but that’s on purpose – it’s a ‘less is more’ thing with us and it is working.”

And there is, of course, a lot more for those retailers to sell now. At this year’s NAMM show Peavey easily scooped the pool for the greatest number of new products unveiled, with an astonishing display, from serious pro audio products, through to guitars to backline – new line after new line. This is particularly unusual in a recessionary climate and Hunt is keen to explain how it came about: “I think from Hartley Peavey’s point of view, he’s utilising technologies that up until recently he’d stayed away from.

“If you look at the Vypyr range of amps, that wasn’t a case of  ‘we’ll put some of these out and see how they go’. Vypyr was a massive project for the company and was years, rather than months, in development. That’s taken us into a lot bigger volumes of product and a lot of that technology, like the new IPR digital power amps, is going to make a major difference to the way our dealers sell – in fact the way punters perceive PA, for example. These are hugely significant products that will change the way people think about the way things are sold.”

If the prospect of a small tsunami of new gear, a more sensible approach towards discounting and a brand name any musician will know still doesn’t do the trick, what does Dave Hunt feel he or his team could say to a retailer to convince him that now is the time to come on board? “Without being blasé about it, I could show you the ten or 15 emails I get a week saying ‘I would like to become a Peavey dealer’, so this is a process that is already happening out there. But if I were trying to explain what we can offer, firstly I would point out that this is a business–enhancing brand. Because of the number of years the brand has been going and because of the product quality and reliability, Peavey is something that is going to make a positive addition to
your shop.

“But it’s true that in one sense Peavey’s different approach is not always understood by dealers outside of our network. When we go to the MIA awards, we’re not going to be getting up every five minutes to receive an award, because there are a lot of shops that still don’t have access to the line, because they perceive that we don’t necessarily fit their profile. Sometimes we’re just too rock n roll for them, or our extensive catalogue unnecessarily overwhelms them.”

Indeed, this may well have been one of the inhibitions that has made dealers hold back, because (whether real or imaginary) they felt that taking on Peavey meant committing a greater slice of one’s shop floor to a single brand than many might feel comfortable with.

Hunt disagrees: “We try to work to an individual dealer’s circumstances. If somebody came to me and said they only want Vypyr, I wouldn’t go with that, but we will work with dealers and try to tailor our offering to suit their situation. Take PA, for example, again. There can often be a fear factor at work where dealers say they don’t do much PA, but once we’ve trained their staff they find they can sell it very easily. We are good at training our dealers through long-established seminars, which are not necessarily Peavey-specific, but are proven time and time again to work.”

THE TEAM EMERGES
The new team will enable Peavey to work even more closely with dealers. Handling just a small territory for MI, but also covering the UK and Ireland for sound reinforcement products is Virgil Lund.

“Virgil has had many years experience in music retail with Academy of Sound, which gives him insight and empathy towards our dealers. Time as a representative with Shuttlesound helped focus him on helping dealers develop their sound reinforcement business.

“Then we have Rob Kerr, who was with Yamaha previously and worked that elusive M62 corridor up to the North of Scotland. We’d struggled in previous years with that territory, which is a particularly difficult one, but Rob knew the dealers and he is exactly what we needed there – a very, very experienced guy who could hit the ground running.

“For the middle of the country, the West and Ireland, we have Ross Bailey, who has come to us from a demonstration background – from Line 6, in fact. He’d done some sales work and also management in the music industry, but that was only part of what appealed. He has a great background in his area and that’s kind of what I was looking to do – I didn’t want a team of five people all the same. Everyone in the Peavey team now has different qualities and experience and that’s a strength for us.

“In the South and London we have Mark Emsley who, like me, had had a break out of the industry, in his case working in tour management. Before that, he worked with Arbiter for a number of years and he brings a knowledge of artists and touring with him which has been
very useful.

“So, if you like, you’ve got Rob, a keyboard player, Ross, a guitar demonstrator, Mark, a tour manager and me, a drummer, also with marketing experience with companies like Cadburys and Coca Cola, plus Virgil, who’s a PA specialist and bass player – so we’re all bringing something different to the team.

“It is all now really starting to gel. We have a great team on the road, we have product arriving – which I know sounds strange, but it has been a problem and we acknowledge that. But January this year was the best month we’ve had since March 2006.

“What has happened in the past six months with Peavey is typical of Hartley Peavey’s attitude. When everyone is cowering in the corners saying ‘Isn’t it quiet out there?’ his approach is ‘Then let’s make it busy again,’ and the changes here are part of that.

“That the company agreed to taking on three new guys with all the associated costs that go with that, in this climate, proves to me that there is a great emphasis from him personally on markets outside the US. One thing I’d come up against in previous incarnations was an American parent company making you feel like the poor relation and that is certainly not the case with Peavey.

“I’m still out on the road four days a week, as I was before. I look after the top 20 accounts in the UK and I do a lot of travel with the reps, as well. It’s about making it happen and that’s a key theme for us and our dealers. One of the courses we do is called ‘retail ready’ which is really all about how to be successful in retail  – get your own database, have your little black book of people you can phone, to mention just a small percentage of the content – that whole thing about covering all your bases to make sure you’re selling as much as you can. Ultimately, I find that people make that sort of positive association with being part of Peavey. That works for us and it works for our dealers.”
PEAVEY: 01536 461234