Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Our first question comes from Reik Read - Robert Baird.
Reik Read - Robert Baird
Mike, you’d touched on this in your remarks, but the status of adding more sales reps in Barcoding. Can you give us a sense for where you are in the hiring process and how much more you had to go? The training process, if there is one? And how those guys are ramping up from a productivity standpoint?
Michael Baur
I’ll talk a little bit about that, but don’t want to get too much away to competition. But we recognized about eighteen months ago that we were not spending as much time as we would like to with some of our smaller customers, and some of them actually represented more business than we thought.
And so when we brought on a few young, rookie sales people, they generated much better results than we’ve anticipated. So, we’ve spent last year really re-tooling our efforts to focus on these small to medium-sized resellers that are going after the small-to-medium business end users. And I think we will continue to do that.
So, we are finding customers that we didn’t realize were as big as they are. We are also finding some really small customers and trying to find efficient ways to handle them. We sell to thousands of customers in the U.S., and we have hundreds of those customers that have dedicated sales reps. But we believe that we can continue to grow our business – even in North America – by continuing to add sales reps on a selective basis.
Reik Read - Robert Baird
And then, Rich, you had talked about a change with the vendor program, adding some inventory and other. And I apologize, you talk faster than I could write. Can you just go through exactly what all the mechanics were of that and maybe give us some insight as to why something like that happens?
Richard Cleys
What happened was we agreed to get extended terms on payables while also agreeing to carry more inventory to improve the fill rates. And there is a slight increase to the pricing of the inventory. But what we do, as we’ve told you in the past, is we look at all of our vendors, we look at all of our business units on a return on invested capital basis. And this was a good business decision for us and for the vendor.
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