[amayausers.com] Re: Independent Sales Reps

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Mary - we faced a similar situation a few years back when starting up.  I was 
working full-time + at two jobs and my wife was going to be the in-home 
embroidery person.  This left little time to get leads.  Here are a few 
thoughts:

1) when you say "independent sales reps" you need to define that.  Do they work 
only for you, or are they getting business for others as well?  If it's only 
for you, then they are simply commissioned salespeople, not really independent, 
although they are not your employees.

2) How do you train them so they can go bid jobs for you.  I had three people 
doing "sales" for me early on, and I would say even though I thought I trained 
them on cost estimates and clothing costs, I was called in on 90% of the 
estimates because they couldn't figure out how to properly price a job.  
Customers care most of all about cost.  Every job starts with "What would this 
cost me?"  If they can't ballpark it on the spot, the sale probably won't 
happen.

3) I paid everyone (and still do) 10% of the total sales price of the job.  I 
make more profit on expensive garments, and less on tees, but overall it works 
out for everybody.  I spent a month trying to come up with scaled commissions, 
and all different ways of calculating things but it seemed that 10% of total 
retail worked best for everybody.  Plus the reps know how much they make on 
each sale without doing any math.

4) Depending on how well the reps understand the business, you may have them 
oversell your capabilities.  I had somebody promise a customer that I could 
deliver over 100 t-shirts in 2 days.  It gone done but not without a lot of 
angst.  Unless they understand what your production time is like (do you have 
young kids that need your time, etc) they are motivated only to sell as much 
product as possible.  They ignore the fact that you may have to work 48 hours 
straight to deliver what they promised.  This becomes more of an issue if you 
have more than one sales rep as they don't know what the others have committed 
you to.

I probably painted a bleak picture, but I still have some friends that bring me 
jobs from time to time for the 10% cut.  I gave each of them 500 business cards 
with their name on it but my phone number so once they get a lead, I take over 
on pricing, delivery times, etc.  If I get a couple of leads a month, I'm 
happy.  I also have one person that I spent about 20 hours educating on the 
business and he hasn't gotten me a single job in 18 months.

Just be sure you investigate all the potential pitfalls before moving down this 
route.

Just my experience on this topic.  Good luck

Tom

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