Everyone faces this issue from time to time.  You need a rep firm in, say Huntsville, to carry your products.  How to find one?  The time honored method is to ask the customers in that area.  After all, you must have some customers or you wouldn’t be worried about a rep, right?  So you ask the customers who their favorite reps are.  The quality of response you get to this question should only serve as a starting point, since their view of a rep firm can be dramatically influenced by whether or not they got invited to the annual rep BBQ, or whether he brings donuts to the early morning meetings.

Another way, in my view a better one, is to find a couple of complementary products, and then look to see who they have for reps.  By complementary products I mean those that are normally used side-by-side with yours.  The obvious example is a company selling bolts.  If you need a rep, look for the ones selling nuts.  Then contact the nut guys — believe me, they’ll be very interested in taking on a bolt line.

Finding complementary products is usually not this obvious, but it’s a good thing to do.  Once you have, make a list of ALL their reps across the country.  That gives you a candidate list when unexpected things happen and you need to replace someone quickly.  Not a bad idea to be in communication with them anyway… you can get a lot of local market intelligence from them.

Tags: channel, rep

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Sales Channels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.