Independent Sales Reps

[Mary]

We are in the early stages of coming up with a "plan" to hire independent sales and marketing reps to help more orders get in the door.
Does anyone have any productive advice for us?
We are trying to come up with a commission base among other incentives.
We are a two-man operation. One of us is here fulltime and the other part time (my husband and I). We need orders coming in while we do the actual embroidery. There's too much starting and stopping to get the business in and getting the orders out on time.
Any advice would be great. Thanks [img]smile.gif[/img]
Mary

[Mr. Sew & Sew]

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

[Mary]

Thanks Tom. You offer valuable advice, much appreciated.