Every company has a organizational hierarchy of sales people… in some, “Area Manager” is the top slot… in others, it’s “Regional Manager.”  Add in District Managers, Sales Associates, Sales Engineers, and on and on.  The problem comes when companies add the term “Sales Representative” to their list of company sales personnel.  And when we refer to them as company personnel, well that’s the point.  All of these people are on the payroll… they work for us… why they’re, um, employees.

So what’s wrong with calling some of them “sales reps?”  Because, by definition, a sales representative is NOT an employee.  More typically a firm, a sales representative firm is an independent company that does not take title or possession of the goods.  They represent you, for a commission, along with the other companies on their line card.  Have any sales employees selling other products besides yours?  Not that you know of, right?  Cause if they were, you’d be calling them for career adjustment meetings.  But that’s what reps do, and it’s a good thing that they do it because that’s the only way they can afford to call on customers to small to send in a direct sales person.

The key isn’t that they are carrying other product lines… it’s that they don’t carry competing product lines.  And because of that, they tend to be loyal parts of the channel.  I know rep firms that have kept some of their major lines for 15 years or more.  In Silicon Valley, at one time the average employee changed companies every 7 years.  Now tell me, who has the most loyalty?  So don’t call your direct sales employees “sales representatives”… it just confuses the heck out of people.

Tags: channel, rep

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 10:27 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.