Blog
Know What You’re Selling
Whether you’re selling garage door openers or guidance control systems, medical devices, kitchen appliances, laminate, or printed circuit boards, you must know your product. If you want to be a successful rep, you must study the product, understand how it is built, why it is built a certain way, and most importantly, why the product your selling is better than […]
Business As Usual
Yes, things are hard right now. Things seem to be as bad as they have ever been and that’s probably true. But we have to move forward, we have to try our best to conduct business as usual, if we are going to survive. Mark my words, no matter how bleak things are right now, how impossible it seems to […]
7 Traits Of Effective Leaders
I once had a boss who wanted to sit in his office all day, never participate in any meetings and then ask us, his managers, to write long tediously detailed reports and give them to him so he would know what was going on. In short he wanted to know everything we were doing without having to participate in anything. […]
What Is Your Business Doing About The CoronaVirus?
We have heard all the bad things concerning this new virus, the numbers, the dangers, the risks, the precautions, the varied political opinions, the damage to sales of Corona beer. Now it’s up to us to come up with ways to operate in these hard times. It is up to us to find ways to conduct business while the virus […]
7 Ways To Choose The Right Business Partner
Finding The Right Partner When you struck out on your own and started your rep firm you had to decide just how large you wanted to firm to be. Many people just strike out on their own and go solo for a while. After a time once the company has successfully launched they might want to find an appropriate partner […]
Salespeople Need To Be Selling
Salespeople need to be selling. Wow! What a brilliant idea. Of course, salespeople need to sell, what else would they be doing if not selling? They are salespeople, right? Sure, they are but they have also been known, at least some of them, to do anything they can rather than be in front of the customers selling. In my many […]
7 Ways To Find New Customers
We all know that companies must grow or they will die. The same thing applies to rep firms. You must keep growing your business, adding new customers, and increasing your sales, or you too will die. Too many times reps will find three or four major customers and then rely on them for their income going forward. Not only is […]
The Solutions Meister
When you’re in business, you are in the business of providing solutions. Think about it, everything we do, everything we sell, products, services, treatments, all of these are solutions to problems, filling needs that our customers have. Restaurants feed hungry people. Hardware stores provide solutions to problems whether you are building a house or fixing a leaky faucet. Doctors and […]
Get the Most Out of Your Reps
It’s no secret that the independent representative/principal relationship is one of the rockiest in the manufacturing world. Here’s a typical example of how it can go wrong: The dance between reps and principals usually starts this way: a company decides it needs more sales and wants to leverage its sales budget, so it recruits a network of reps. Often, the […]
Becoming a Great Sales Manager
Building a Great Team Through Inspiration We all assume that being a great sales manager, or any manager for that matter, is by holding your people accountable. Oh, that accountability thing, that’s what we live and die for, to make sure that everyone is being held accountable…but is it really? And, to whom are they supposed to be accountable? To […]
