5 Things A Vendor Can Do To Help Reps Sell More Of Their Goods

After a long conversation with a new sales manager at a vendor that hasn’t seen much action from me lately, I noticed she sent out a blanket email asking other reps for “Five Things You’d Recommend Us Do” to get more business. Great move, and a great topic.

Many vendors do not try to get this kind of feedback and they really ought to, be it from reps or customers themselves. I’ve seen many vendors go along their business thinking they know what they are doing but they find out too late they don’t.

It reminds me of a trip to a shopping center during the holidays with my kids when they were ages 2 and 4. I had my 2-year-old daughter in my right hand, my 4-year-old son in the left. He was at the age when he was figuring he could do everything on his own, he didn’t need hand-holding. The mall was packed with crowds of shoppers, and I kept telling him to hold onto my hand. He kept arguing. So I let go and told him to stick close.

Naturally, his attention started to wander and he drifted away in the crowd, but I kept an eye on him. He looked up and realized he was lost, and the panic on his face, the tears welling up in his eyes were unmistakable.

It’s not unlike the vibes we get when we see a vendor who’s steadfastly refused any sort of feedback for years, finally go down the tubes and out of business.

So here are five things they can do to help us reps, and by extension their customers, sell more of their product:

1. Have Marketing Materials. A website is fine, but keep it up to date. You should have print also—don’t use the lame excuse you’re “going green”. LLBean uses both print and website marketing to catalog their product and they are probably more “green” than you’ll ever be.
2. Share Marketing Materials. If you enter into a relationship with a rep it means you want access to the relationships he/she has with customers you probably don’t have. So if the rep wants X amount of catalogs or passwords to your website, for goodness’ sake, give them to the rep! Unless of course you have all the business you can handle, but then…how many vendors can make that claim?
3. Have Something New To Report. Monthly, weekly, semi-annually—whatever cycle applies to your industry. This gives the rep something new to, in turn, tell the customer. And besides, it makes you as a vendor look relevant. A monthly sale on some particular item or category among your products is an easy way to do this. Just having new releases is good, but spice it up a bit. Sales, promotions, thematically inspired stuff is good and makes customers eager to hear from you via the rep.
4. Logistics—keep them up-to-date. Not only your website and catalogs, but your bookkeeping and the way you communicate. When every other vendor is sending art and information via email with PDFs and Jpegs, if you are faxing this kind of information, a rep will tend to ignore or forget you. E-invoicing is another great new feature. Take advantage of technology to make everyone’s job easier. Your reps and customers will love you for it.
5. Respect Reps’ Images. Never, ever, make the rep look bad to a customer unless they really truly are bad and have misrepresented your product or corporate image. Even if it's done unintentionally, correct it yourself, don’t leave it up to the rep. For instance, let’s say you’ve just hired a new receptionist who is ignorant of the fact that an order a rep placed three weeks ago is stalled in credit. That customer calls to ask where his order is and the new receptionist says “We don’t have it here”. The customer is instantly going to blame the rep. When this occurs, contact the customer and apologize for the confusion. I’ve personally stopped selling anything for lines that did this—why bother when I’ve got other lines that thoroughly train anyone before letting them answer such queries? Even if it is an isolated case, the vendor should waste no time taking corrective action. Your reps are partners so treat them as such.

There are more things that vendors can do to ease their relationships with reps; these are the most obvious and any well-run company ought to do these things even if they don’t use independent sales reps.