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For two and a half years, making subscription calls for the Wall Street Journal was a fine piece of business for Laurel-based Protocall Communications, an outbound business-to-business teleservices company.
The relationship was profitable for Protocall. The Wall Street Journal was happy. Barring some catastrophic event, Protocall could have continued to make the calls for years to come, or even expanded its offerings to serve the newspaper in other ways. Instead, in early 2001 Protocall pulled the plug on the relationship.
"We made a decision that that was not our forte," said Ellen Kleinknecht, Protocall co-owner and co-founder along with husband Scott Kleinknecht, Requiring specialized employees and resources, the Wall Street Journal account "just diluted our efforts," she recalls. In addition, the journal wasn't interested in switching to the pay-for-performance model Protocall sees as integral to its future success.
The decision was just one step in an overall strategy to focus on a narrow market a goal Protocall has pursued since 1997 when the Kleinknechts decided to concentrate solely on outbound telemarketing. It was then that the two scrapped most of the business lines they...