Four Offices Shut, Sales Staff Cut In Quotron Reorg

As expected, Quotron reorganized its sales and marketing group last week, eliminating 14 positions. Four of the vendor's ten remote sales offices were closed, with 14 members of the sales and sales support staff also "job- discontinued," as Citicorp parlance has it.

The reorganization reduces the number of regional sales vice presidents to three from five and adds a second national account sales vice president. The remainder of the positions eliminated were primarily technical and sales support functions.

As part of the move, Quotron plans to close its regional offices in Boston, Miami, Philadelphia and St. Louis. Staff from the Philadelphia and St. Louis offices will continue to support customers from alternate locations.

Quotron's remaining six national sales offices will assume such major regional accounts in the Boston and Miami territories, which include recently renewed Advest Group Inc. (IMD, Feb. 17) and Raymond James & Associates Inc.

"We found that service done out of smaller regional offices has become redundant as we move forward with IBM," says Alan Weiss, vice president of sales and marketing at Quotron and architect of the reorganization. Quotron's recent pact with IBM leaves Big Blue handling customer support and field service, as well as Quotron's wide area network (IMD, Dec. 23, 1991).

"Secondly," Weiss adds, "we had too many sales managers for the total environment we were managing, organized against our customer base not as efficiently as I'd like."

From five regional managers, three have emerged under the new order. The two departing are Mike Lambke and Steve Gillin, vice presidents of the Central and Northeastern regional sales, respectively, and Quotron's two longest serving sales managers.

Under Weiss's previous reorganization last December (IMD, Nov. 25), the number of regional vice presidents grew from two--Lambke and Gillin--to five. With the removal of Lambke and Gillin, Weiss will have only one direct report that he didn't himself promote into their current positions.

The three remaining regional heads are Steve Christiansen, responsible for the Southeast, Mike Naughton, responsible for the Western and Central region, and Tony Sepp in the Northeast. Sepp was put in charge of a new business sales team under the previous reorganization and retains that role as well.

In the new organization, responsibility for national accounts has been divided into institutional and retail. Vice president Paul Savage retains managerial responsibility for Quotron's national retail accounts, including Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. and PaineWebber Inc. Ed Berlin, previous head of institutional marketing, gains charge of National Accounts Institutional, including Morgan Stanley & Co. and Salomon Brothers Inc.

In addition, Weiss adds to his organization some five technical account managers previously part of Joel Rosner's Professional Services group. Rosner recently left Quotron to work in trading systems development at Shearson Lehman Brothers Inc. Because these technical managers were providing technical support and project management for national accounts, they will be absorbed into national account retail and institutional sales.

Before Weiss's last reorganization, Berlin was project head for Trading Support System (TSS), Quotron's UNIX workstation- based local data distribution platform. Leveraging TSS's ability to support EJV Partner L.P.'s UniVu fixed-income data and analytics platform, Quotron is working to gain commitments to install TSS at firms' trading rooms (Trading Systems Technology, Feb. 24).

Last week's reorganization brings TSS more closely into Quotron's product line. A recent deal signed with Desktop Data Inc. to add a news-filtering package to TSS will add news to the third-party market data feeds TSS already handles, potentially giving TSS a broader cross-market appeal (IMD, April 27).

Quotron's marketing organization was essentially unaffected by last week's reshuffle. But in an unrelated move, Weiss lost his chief of staff, Marguerite Lee, who is leaving to join a startup software company.