Smooth the Challenges of Running a Rep Business

• I need my reps to get more face time with the customer – I need quicker ways for them to do their behind the scenes work like putting together bills of materials and communicating documents back and forth with the customer – and considering how long it takes to train a good rep, that will pay off tremendously – I suspect that alone would allow us to grow our revenues by at least 25%.

• There’s something else I need to enable reps to spend more time with the customer – I need to get them away from their obsession about constantly checking commissions – and worrying over who gets what share. If I had a reliable commission management system that was clear in the way it determined and reported commissions, it wouldn’t be an issue.

• Supplier relationships are critical to my business and I find myself spending more of my time managing these relationships, yet another distraction from my desire to focus my time on customer selling. The forecast reports I provide them are time consuming for me and my reps and ultimately inadequate. I need tools to quickly and accurately develop supplier forecasts for work I have in design and work I am actively closing.

• To effect continuous improvement in my business, I need an on-going picture of how it’s doing, at a 50,000 foot level – and I need ways to track performance, of my reps, of my project managers as well as of customer activity.

• We need project management tools to keep us from letting things slip time-wise or fall through the cracks completely – our people are so busy juggling so many balls that it’s inevitable that they drop a few – some facility to help us manage shop drawings, ordering, and site coordination and to expedite delieries would really pay off for us. And we need something that is so good that everyone will want to use it – the fact that each person does it his own way now makes it hard for me to manage, and especially hard when and if someone leaves.

• We need to be pro-active in expediting our deliveries – and then billing our customers without waiting to be billed ourselves – that plus more effective collections will improve our cash flow substantially – it might save us as much as $100,000 / year.

• Something far more important would come from our ability to respond in a timely way to our customers and to expedite deliveries, and that is greater customer satisfaction – it would be amazing to not have to deal with customers complaining – and that would make me a lot happier and less stressed – now that would be priceless!

• We need an integrated sysem.  Our people spend so much time moving data back and forth between the different systems we have – and often there are discrepancies between systems they can’t reconcile – our ‘islands of information’ problem is costing us thousands of dollars per month, and even more in frustration – and the fact that these separate systems discourage the sharing of information among people in our various departments – and the fact that the information isn’t timely – costs us big-time in missed opportunities.

Learn how one rep turned his 'issues' into Competitve Advantage.