Imagine that you’re a sales rep sitting in a client’s office. You have to get product literature to the client immediately. How do you do it?

If you work with Intelemedia, a five-year-old telecommunications company in Richardson, TX, you could call a toll-free number and have the literature faxed directly to the client’s office. Called Fax On Command, the service relies on compiled information that any company can store with Intelemedia for faxing to reps when they dial a 1-800, 1-888 or 1-900 number. Reps can request specific documents by number. Punch the number into the phone after hearing the automated response and those documents immediately begin faxing out to the field to any number the rep enters.

“You can send as many as 45 versions of the same document,” says Lary Brown, Intelemedia president. Companies can send different versions of the same document to different geographic regions or different industries, each document customized to its respective audience.

Intelemedia’s system knows which geographic version of a document to send based on the phone number that calls to ask for it, Brown says.A rep can also personalize the document with the client’s name and title on the cover sheet of the fax page.

The documents originate from Intelemedia’s headquarters, where an IVR (interactive voice response) system fields requests. Intelemedia can also translate documents into other languages and answer the phone in other languages, Brown says.

While any company can use the service, Brown notes it’s ideal for companies that use resellers to sell their products because they often don’t have product literature available. “They’re less familiar with the internal materials,” Brown says, indicating it’s much easier for them to be able to dial into Intelemedia’s service to get them.The service saves money by reducing document and printing costs. It also helps reps get the right version of a document for their client, “instead of sending the wrong document because there are so many of them,” Brown says.

Ron Cohen, an area sales manager for Para Systems, a Carrollton, TX, manufacturer of power supplies and battery back ups, uses the Fax On Command service. The company sells through distributors and uses the service to get information to them. “The quick fax service saves time, it’s efficient for me,” he says. “Whenever someone calls in and needs specs on a system, I can get it to them within two minutes.”

Cohen also likes the quality of the faxes, saying the software enhances them so they come through extremely clear. “It looks likes they’ve been printed at a higher resolution,” he says.

He says the company has 40 documents it can send in seven different categories, such as product information, product specs, presales information, price lists and news releases. One or more of the documents can be faxed at the same time. If the reseller’s fax machine is busy when a document is being sent, the system continues to resend it.

Another version of Intelemedia’s service is called Fax On Demand.” Here, customers dial in to request their own documents. Customers can request documents by number just like sales reps can, or they can select from a menu of documents. When a company uses the system this way it can provide the toll-free number to its customers just as it would provide its own number. Customers can call for the materials any time they like.