Games Workshop is building a second U.S. sales force, separate from the group that reps its tabletop wargames to retailers now, for its Entertainment and Media Division (EMD).  The Entertainment and Media Division  includes everything except the core tabletop wargaming business:  Sabertooth Games, which produces CCG and CMG products; BL Publishing, its fiction and comic publishing division; Warp Artefacts; Warhammer Historical; and Warhammer Online.  Most important for retailers will be the effects on Sabertooth and BL Publishing. 

 

We talked to Vincent Rospond, sales and marketing manager for Black Library and BL Publishing about the changes.

 

Tell us about your sales plans for EMD. 

What we've done is created our own national sales force, with EMD/Sabertooth, working out of Memphis.  We have a national account manager, Dan Rumley.  I have three other regional account managers.  They'll be dealing with retailers for comic shops and specialty stores, for the book trade for Sabertooth CMGs, potentially for our Warhammer historical line.  That will be what we'll start off with, and then we'll add some other products over the next few months.

 

Is this a relatively new development?  When did this start?

It essentially went live June 1st.  We're still in the process of organizing it but we do have some sales numbers set up to handle accounts.  We're trying to give attractive terms to retailers. 

 

Are the regional guys working out of Memphis also?

Yes, they're all working out of Memphis.

 

What was the rationale behind splitting up the sales organization between Games Workshop and EMD?  

Games Workshop needs to concentrate on tabletop wargaming.  That's really where their market is. And frankly, we've got at this point, got Games Workshop as a corporate entity developing a lot of interesting lines that are not tabletop wargaming.  They really need the proper attention of a sales force.  So this allows us to group everything under one umbrella. 

 

People want the account managers to know what the product line is, to be familiar with it,  familiar with what's coming out, what's good and bad about it, what we can do to create promotions for them, what we can do to create tournaments, in house visits by authors and designers, and it allows us as a whole to concentrate on non-tabletop wargaming and support retailers. 

 

Does the sales force support sales through distribution, or just to your direct accounts?

We do both.  Where accounts are serviced by distributors, we try and help the distributors support those accounts.  In those cases where we have some accounts that go directly to us, obviously we support them stores as much as we can as well.  But either way, we try and maintain support to our client base.