INTERVIEW ‘The team is key’


Pinar Erzin is founder and president of Accucoms


Tell us a little about your background?


I was born and raised in Ankara, Turkey. I studied at a private French high school where we covered all lessons in French and then I studied American Culture and Literature at the university. After my BA degree, I moved to The Netherlands where I learned Dutch and lived for more than 20 years. This is also where I started Accucoms in 2004.


Learning foreign languages was an important matter at our home; as my father always said to me and my sister: ‘one language means one person’. He continuously emphasised the importance of speaking different languages and communicating with other cultures. He said: ‘You have to eat with them, laugh with them and share with them.’ As I write these lines, I realise what an impact his words had on how I have built my company.


In a nutshell, what does Accucoms do?


Accucoms represents publishers across the world, as their extended sales, marketing and customer service arm. We are a mini- multi-national with more than 60 people located in different parts of the world, speaking approximately 30 languages and we have very strong relationships with libraries across the globe. We communicate with libraries and the users on behalf of the publishers we represent, to serve the libraries better, to generate new business, open new markets for our publishers and maintain their current businesses. Our head office is in Leiden, The Netherlands and currently we have teams located managing Europe, North and Latin America, The Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, India, South East Asia and South Korea. We also have plans


@researchinfo www.researchinformation.info Members of the Accucoms Team


to move onto some other territories we have not been active in yet. We do telesales campaigns, sales representation, market research and analysis, and customer services for all STM publishers. Recently we launched The Aggregagent, which is a solution for scholarly publishers to be able to sell meaningful collections.


How did you become part of Swets?


Swets was my school for this industry as I started working there in 1999 as customer service for Turkey. I knew nothing about subscription business in the STM world. The late 90s were the years when Swets was flourishing as an industry leader in its subscription agency role. Soon after I joined, I became publishers relations manager for Europe and then general manager for Extenza Marketing Solutions. Extenza was Swets’ initiative to serve publishers with several services like marketing and sales, distribution and fulfilment and e-publishing. In 2004, I left Swets/Extenza to incorporate Accucoms as an independent sales agent working on behalf of publishers. In 2005, Accucoms took over Extenza Marketing Solutions from Swets and


‘I thought the circle was round, but apparently it wasn’t’


focused on developing our relations with publishers further. At the beginning we were simply a telemarketing company chasing lapsed subscriptions, which I believe still is a very valuable activity. Gradually we established dedicated representation services in multiple territories. Interestingly and surprisingly, several years later, Swets and its completely new management wanted to acquire the company to develop its commercial publisher services further. After much consideration and discussion, we sold Accucoms to Swets in August 2011.


Obviously, the relationship turned sour when Swets was declared bankrupt. You turned things around quickly though – how did you manage that? Actually when I sold the company to Swets in 2011, I thought the circle was round, but apparently it wasn’t… We had a solid agreement between me and Swets management; they wanted me to


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