Business Spotlight: The Telecom Torch

Marketing firm Sunrise Communications Inc. is making a name for itself by blending old-school call center services with a new approach to selling telecommunications.

“We are a company that specializes in marketing telecom services nationally for carriers like AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Time-Warner Cable and others,” says President Eric Rowden. “We also function as a master agent for some of those same companies, providing their packaged services to our network of independent channel partners, small (information technology) shops and business systems companies.”

In its two-pronged approach, Sunrise Communications conducts contracted telemarketing campaigns targeting residential leads and businesses, either with service upgrades for existing clients or “win-back” campaigns for lapsed customers. The company also offers services on the back-end, essentially acting as a wholesale intermediary for small, independent IT/phone consultants that augment their business by selling phone, wireless and Internet services packages.

Dialed in
With roots in wireless retail, Rowden says the company always has been entrenched in the telecom space, and he sees the move to Sunrise Communications’ current model as more transition than departure. Its network of independent partners includes local companies Layer 3 Technologies, Losh Communications and Net Vision Communications, as well as roughly 40 subagents throughout the Midwest, that contract with Sunrise.

“We kept on with what we were doing on the call center side,” says Rowden, who also owns Sunrise Media Partners, a separate company that provides traditional, contracted call center services to companies. “The new operation started with us bringing all sales in-house, and then building our group of subagent partners.”

That task falls to Susan Selsor, vice president of partner channel. Sunrise’s bifurcated approach creates distinct revenue streams: Contracts with the call center provide immediate, performance-based income, which helps fund the partner network operations; and revenue from subagents, she says, are more residual in nature.

“On some of the bundled services we deal with, we won’t see our portion of the revenues for 60 to 90 days from close of contract. But long-term, it’s a good strategic partnership,” she says.

In 2013, Sunrise’s list of subagent partners has grown to 40 from less than 10. Combined with call center activity, Rowden says the company has experienced 2013 revenue growth of 225 percent, though he declined to disclose financial figures. He says 2014 revenue is projected to grow another 100 percent.

Mature market
Springfield has been a call center hotbed since Worldcom/MCI located a major call center here in the 1980s. After peaking its capacity at 1,000 seats, its numbers dwindled to 400 before closing in 2006.

Ryan Mooney, senior vice president of development for the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce, points to the presence of large call centers operated by household names Chase Card Services (NYSE: JPM), Expedia Inc. (Nasdaq: EXPE) and T-Mobile U.S. Inc. (NYSE: TMUS).

“There’s a certain maturity to our call center market,” Mooney says. “Except for its home office, the highest concentration of Expedia employees anywhere – 1,000 people – is right here in Springfield. Our Springfield location survived a nationwide round of T-Mobile call center closures, and is rebuilding back toward its 700-seat capacity.”

Despite that history, the Ozarks call center industry is nuanced, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Of more than 7,000 telemarketers in Missouri, 2,050 were employed in the greater Springfield area. Despite holding a slight edge in total employment compared to Kansas City, the mean annual pay for a local telemarketer, $19,800, was 13 percent less than the state average.

Sunrise’s recruiting efforts are partially targeting the Branson timeshare and vacation market that continues a recessional slump. Selsor says Sunrise is hiring for two daily shifts between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., and she compares its “mostly warm” contact lists to inside sales versus cold-calling.

“This is definitely not vacation sales,” he says. “In tourism, if you happen to make a sale, it’s a high-five thing – you’re ready to call it a day. Here, some of our top people close a sale every hour or two, almost every day.”

Sunrise jobs start at $8 to $10 per hour and top performers average $12 to $15 per hour.

Even with an industry-standard turnover rate of around 25 percent, Sunrise staff rolls have grown nearly tenfold since 2012, to nearly 100 employees today at its 2025 E. Chestnut Expressway office. Rowden expects that figure to double again in the next year.

“We bought this building about a year and a half ago,” he says of their location at Pythian and Chestnut Expressway. “We were thinking that someday – maybe – we’d grow into the unused area. Today, we’re already there.”

Sunrise is converting 3,000 square feet of the building’s warehouse space into an additional 80-seat call center, bringing total capacity to more than 200 seats. Rowden attributes the rapid growth to a combination of technology and personality.

“Our dialer program is cloud-based and scalable, and we built our own Web-based (customer relationship management) platform, which tracks real-time performance metrics such as hourly call, contact and revenue numbers,” he says. “But from our IT people to sales supervisors, to top managers, we’ve also made the effort to hire in people with a high skill set, great sales backgrounds. They deliver for our customers.”[[In-content Ad]]