As one of the biggest outsourced sales and marketing companies in Australia, and with a list of blue-chip clients, CPM Australia has had a huge impact on the industry since its establishment in 1994.
As part of the global CPM group, the Australian branch of the company started with one client and 15 field staff. The group managing director, Andrew Potter, who has been there almost from the start, has spent the past 20 years putting all he has into ensuring that CPM is not just successful but operates with integrity and efficiency and continues to be a great place for employees to work.
These days, CPM covers all aspects of sales and marketing, providing outsourced services including direct sales teams, merchandising, assisted selling, retail activation, local area marketing, contact centres, and training solutions. At the end of the day, we convert consumers into buyers, says Andrew. To achieve sales, we invest in our sales force to ensure they have the right product knowledge and are equipped to have a customer conversation.
Andrew came to CPM from a business marketing background, and after more than 25 years in the industry he really knows his trade. “I studied business marketing at the University of South Australia in the mid 80s and then moved to London to work for a couple of years in a marketing agency,” Andrew says. ”After my working visa expired, I returned to Australia and joined DuPont in Melbourne. In 1995, I joined four other guys who had just started CPM Australia.”
The company has grown exponentially since then. After starting small, it now has many more clients, several of whom are some of the largest, well-known brands in Australia. ”Twenty-one years ago, we started with just one client Telstra MobileNet. They needed an outsourced merchandising team to service their dealer channel. Now, in 2015, we probably have more than 50 clients and a weekly payroll of about 800 staff. The outsourced services that we now provide include sales force outsourcing, sales force augmentation, a 200-seat Melbourne-based call centre, as well as a retail activation team that works in retail stores on behalf of various clients.”