TURNER REORGANIZES SALES FORCE

DAN ALAIMO

ATLANTA -- Turner Home Entertainment here has restructured and enlarged its sales force to include more supermarket representatives.

Three new positions -- sell-through sales director, special markets sales manager and national accounts sales manager -- will be dedicated to the company's sell-through efforts with supermarkets, mass merchants, warehouse clubs and other key home entertainment retailers. The representatives are expected to be named this month. They will report to Craig Van Gorp, vice president of sell-through sales.

"The volume of business [Turner Home Entertainment] is doing in the sell-through market has increased so dramatically that additional sales support became necessary to handle the workload," said Van Gorp. Stuart Snyder, Turner's executive vice president and general manager of domestic home video, said the new positions will help the company to better service and expand the supermarket video business.

"Clearly, supermarkets have proven to be a wonderful outlet for our sell-through and rental videos," Snyder said. "We believe that we can grow this business by doing a better job of calling on the marketplace." Besides the new sell-through positions, Turner also has formed a new retail sales division, and has added a new regional director and three new regional sales managers to its distribution sales staff. Norm Burrington, former Northeast regional sales manager for the company, has been named director of retail sales to head the new retail sales division.

Eight new retail sales representatives will report to Burrington: Ellen Atkinson for the Southeast; Timothy Coggeshall, North Central; Lisa Hardin, Midwest; David Mechem, Western; Steve Nolan, Northeast; Michael Schayer, Northwest; James Vogelaar, South Central; and Tina Wells, Mid-Atlantic. In distribution sales, Michelle Wolbert has been promoted to director of sales, Western region. She was formerly South Central regional sales manager. She joins Joe Amodei, who continues as director of sales, Eastern region. Three new regional sales managers have been added to service the distributors.

Scott Voss has been named Midwest regional sales manager, reporting to Wolbert. Jack DeFillip has been named north central regional sales manager and Suzanne Blech has been named northeast regional sales manager, both reporting to Amodei. Voss was formerly Midwest account manager for Warner Elektra Atlantic Home Video. DeFillip joins Turner from WEA Visual Entertainment, where he was brand video sales manager for Philadelphia.