Dealer Sales Reps – An Endangered Species?

By: Norm MacLeod

It was late summer back in the day and a bunch of us industry guys were out on Lake Simcoe cruising around on a vendor’s giant yacht (a converted PT boat actually) when an enormous wind gust came up out of nowhere. A couple of the deck chairs were swept into the water and we gleefully yelled out Deck chairs overboard. Some wit then yelled to the President of the then second largest national commercial stationer, “Hey, one of your reps has blown overboard too.” Without any hesitation the President yelled back, “Save the deck chairs.” That was back pre-web of course but are sales reps any higher on the respect scale in these days of on-line digital sales, marketing and customer service?

 

 Based on the current practices of the major North American chains I think the answer has to be No. Whenever their stock craters, the first thing they usually announce is that they are successfully implementing their synergistic, customer-centric, negatively optimized growth plan and that by the way, they’ll also be cutting back the outside sales force. Do dealer sales reps have a life expectancy longer than Lady Gaga’s current hair style and how on earth do they get to a level of respect commensurate with their real value?

I think the answer to the first question is a conditional yes. There is still something to be said for the personal touch in securing, negotiating and maintaining a solid customer relationship, at least in the B2B world. To ensure that this value is maintained and also to begin increasing their respect level dealer reps must work smarter than they ever have before. A large part of working smart is learning to use Analytics. Whether a rep is a hunter, farmer or just a nice smile with a free hot lunch, they need to go past the usual CRM clichés (how about those Leafs?) and actually understand their customers’ needs and where the opportunities lie within each account. While the digital world may be threatening the rep’s existence it is a double edged sword in that it also provides gigabytes of data on each and every customer and allows them to touch customers more frequently and effectively than ever before.

Back a few years ago, when reps were being pointed and incented in the direction of the new frontier of Cleaning, Breakroom supplies, I checked, where I worked, with the person who orders all supplies for the office whether our Office Supplies rep had mentioned that they now sell CB supplies. The answer of course was no. All of our purchase transactions are processed online, a simple request to Google Analytics or Coremetrics would have provided the rep with a complete breakdown easily sorted by product category. The rep could then easily see that no CB supplies were being ordered. They could also see that every 3^rd or 4^th cycle of toner ordering was going to someone else and that on some orders the copy paper was being dropped as well. This kind of knowledge and understanding is POWER.

These types of analytics allow maximum account penetration and can also help identify product areas where pricing or quality may be an issue. This is also a role the rep is best suited to fill since they have the most to lose and/or gain. I’m not sure how much autonomy reps have in altering the customer’s price matrix but having the ability to tinker with the complex product/price matrix would allow the reps to address cost issues while maintaining the overall account GP. Is this within the rep’s current skill set?

The digi-com world can also allow a much closer relationship to form with the actual end users within a company rather than just a cost-conscious purchasing agent. When a design firm orders the Econo 4’ X 8’ whiteboard, an e-mail followup should probably be sent to the department chief pointing out that a board designed to last 2 or 3 years of use isn’t the most economical choice when the multiple re-order and mounting costs are factored in over a longer period. This would certainly be a better response than calling to say the board they want is back-ordered.

When the same firm orders a suite of Bush or Sauder RTA furniture, maybe the rep should be texting to point out that the products will require a day’s labour to assemble and that the products are not designed to be moved once in place. Of course, these followups require a reasonable level of product knowledge (which is a whole other topic) but for reps to ever be respected it’s an area they really need to work harder at. Building trust and providing genuine value added service is the best form of job security a rep can have. Even if there is a termination due to “right-sizing” that account will probably belong to the rep more than the company.

Another type of analytic can also help account openers. Have you googled the company you are making the pitch to? At the very least, you’ll be able to get some basic stats like how big they are, whether they have other branch offices, who owns them, how many employees they have. If they are publically held, check out their financial status and read their Investor Relations information. Most companies will also have a mission statement and a more qualitative summary of who they are, what they stand for. Knowing that the mission statement of the company emphasizes their environmental sensitivity or a commitment to buying local can make all the difference in the focus of your proposal.

Do reps routinely check out the principals listed on the web-site on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to understand their special interests and past history? Knowing that the key decision maker used to work for one of your current accounts could help in winning a contract. Do the homework, it’ll pay off. The customer will respect the efforts you have made and the bosses will be impressed by your proactive approach.

Digital tools are there to be used and rather than budgeting x number of hours for cold-calling a week, perhaps there would be a greater return if those x hours were allocated to studying and applying customer analytics. The rep’s future really comes down to survival of the tech-smartest.

 

Introducing Mancini Leather Goods

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you  my newest product line, welcome aboard MANCINI Leather Goods Inc., a proud Canadian company, established in 1989.

From their Montreal base, Mancini Leather Goods have grown to become an industry leader in travel, business and personal products, with a dedicated effort to provide the highest quality merchandise. Their inspired collections of ladies’ and men’s fine leather wallets and accessories combined with their business and travel products are the perfect fusion of style and function showcasing the natural characteristics of the finest quality leathers and premium materials from around the world.

 

 

5th Avenue Collection

Fine Leather Wallets & Accessories • Passport Organizers • Luggage & Travel Bags

Business Products • Briefcases • Laptop Cases & Backpacks • Attaché Cases • Catalog Cases

Colombian Collection

 

Mancini has focused their attention on creating unique designs of unparalleled quality and workmanship. In keeping with their legacy of excellence, all of their fine products are supported by an impeccable reputation for support and service. All this while providing one of the most competitive quality-price-value offerings in market.

Biztech Collection

 

I am proud to add Mancini Leather Goods to my portfolio of high quality office products and I am confident that MANCINI Leather Goods reflect the professional approach that my customers seek out for their clients. I look forward to introducing this line to the Office Product industry and helping your firm gain valuable market share in this field.

Feel free to browse the Mancini  Leather Goods on-line showroom at  www.mancinileather.com.

For more information, contact Fullerton Sales & Marketing.

COPA Awards Gala

Announcing the 2014 COPA Awards winners

 

The Motown-themed 2014 COPA Stars Gala was another memorable and entertaining evening for our industry. Nearly 160 industry luminaries gathered on Thursday, November 27 at the Bellagio in Vaughan, Ontario to honour excellence and raise proceeds for the COPA Scholarship Fund and "Movember".

Guests started their evening off at the open bar mingling over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, as the silent auction table buzzed with stiff competition for two iPad minis and the 49" LG flat screen. The grand prize basket, courtesy of 3M Canada Company, which consisted of $500 worth of gift certificates ($150 at LCBO, $150 at Canadian Tire, $150 at The Keg, and $50 at Cineplex) was also hotly contended for. Overall, the silent auction, grand prize draw, winter accessories/jewellery table and candy bar, raised approximately $5,500 in proceeds.

Emceed by COPA’s own chair, Elio Tremonti at Staples Canada, and president, Sam Moncada, the night seemed to fly by once guests were seated for dinner and the awards show.
By far, the most touching moment of the night came during the Individual Award of Excellence presentation to Gary Quinnell, formerly of Staples Canada. Mr. Quinnell was overcome with emotion as Pete Gibel, his former boss at Staples Canada, talked of his great personal and professional contributions to the organization and OP industry. Mr. Gibel’s introduction was followed by a video tribute, created by the Staples Canada team, featuring testimonials from co-workers and colleagues, including vendors that worked with Mr. Quinnell, as well as his wife and children. Welcomed to the podium with a standing ovation, Mr. Quinnell gave an emotional acceptance speech and returned to his seat with another standing ovation. All in all, it is clear that Mr. Quinnell left a great personal and professional legacy across the industry and is a well-deserving candidate for COPA’s highest individual honour in 2014.


COPA handed out nine awards at this year’s Gala with ACCO Brands sweeping several categories thanks to their Hilroy and Kensington brands. Nevertheless, the Awards Committee had some close calls to make this year as the contention was very close in many of the categories. The 2014 COPA Awards winners are:

Category Development

  

3M Canada Company - Scotch® Expressions

 

 

Honourable mention in this category:

 

Fellowes Canada Inc. - Auto Feed Shredders - AutoMax™

 

Corporate Social Responsibility Leadership – Program

 

Beatties Basics Office Products - Environmental Responsibility
 

Staples Canada - Staples Canada Recycle for Education Computer Lab Contest

 

 

 

 

Corporate Social Responsibility Leadership – Product

ACCO Brands Canada - Me to We Back-to-School Collection in conjunction with Staples and Free the Children

Thinking about Expanding your assortment.......how about Booze?

I came across an article a few weeks back regarding a New Zealand OP dealer's efforts to expand their product offering and found it very amusing. There has been lots of talk about dealers in our business expanding into non-traditional areas.......maybe they should consider this?

From the New Zealand Herald

An office supplies company's request to deliver beer and spirits to customers has been rejected.

Auckland's "Gem Office Products Depot" wanted to deliver alcohol alongside fruit juice, stationery and cleaning supplies to office workers.

Under the Sale of Liquor Act, local licensing authorities can grant off-licences if they think alcohol sales are an "appropriate complement" to other goods a business sells.

Neither police nor the Medical Officer of Health opposed Gem's application, but Auckland's district licensing inspector Stephen Galvin claimed booze was not an appropriate complement to other goods Gem sold, which were overwhelmingly office supplies.

Gem disagreed, saying it was developing its business into a "one-stop shop" for customers.

Gem said it was reasonable to expect some offices to order drinks, including alcoholic ones, when ordering stationery and office supplies.

Judge John Hole disagreed with the company.

"In this case, the sale of alcohol has nothing to do with the kind of goods sold by the applicant. Non-alcoholic drinks constitute a very small part of the overall business of the applicant."

Judge Hole also pointed out other firms had made similar bids, and failed.

One earlier case involved an application from an Ashburton company Combined Rural Traders Society, which wanted to sell beer, wine and spirits from its site as well as a range of rural merchandise. The High Court turned that request down.

Hey, what with the dealer community trying to expand their assortments from A to Z as a total solution for everything - maybe we here in Canada should try this? Think the beer companies need an agent to put this together?

Beyond Motivation Is Decision

The importance of  Consistent Motivation.

 Article #5 –  Solutions for the Human Side of Business - By: Jonathan Creaghan  

 I had a wonderful conversation with a friend about why some people achieve their goals and others don’t. He had been sharing his experience of feeling excited about working out and losing weight. For the first month his determination was high, and then it waned after he injured himself during a workout session. His commitment to his goal fizzled out. Frustrated with himself, he couldn’t get back to his original regime and enthusiasm.

 

 We have all been there — we start something with vigour and passion, only to find our excitement and energy naturally dissipates after a while. The problem is that we interpret this waning as a loss of interest, making it difficult to overcome the natural ups and downs we are inevitably going to face.  

I can imagine your heads nodding as I write this. The issue is not the loss of enthusiasm, the issue is where you have placed your attention and energy. Typically, we place a great deal of emphasis on the initial excitement and passion we feel for our cause, and rely on that unbridled energy to move us forward. This energy, which is difficult to sustain because of its naive nature, can disappear very quickly at the first set back.

 

 

The same pattern can be seen in companies wanting to improve: great beginning, but short-lived follow through.  If we feel enthusiastic, we move forward. If we feel we’ve lost that energy, we panic and question our decision — or worse, beat ourselves up for losing it. An enormous amount of time is spent wondering why we are not excited any more. Our mistake is relying on a passion that isn’t deep enough to handle varying external conditions or fragile internal emotions. Shift your focus away from whether you are excited, and you will see that this lost energy can be directed to a re-commitment to the original purpose.

 

“Goal is to be efficient and economical with your actions”

 

Contrary to what you hear from most motivational speakers, you don’t need to get up every morning feeling passionate about your life. Nor is it necessary to be excited about your goal every moment. You don’t need to artificially build yourself up. The energy it takes to do so is energy better spent on just achieving what you want. The goal is to be efficient and economical with your actions right now. When you do this, you can then maintain the higher levels of energy and focus over a longer period of time, and ultimately achieve your goal faster.  

It is never about the level of sustained enthusiasm, it’s about the efficient use of energy and focus over time at an appropriate level to create quality outcomes. And believe it or not, this is easily attainable. You just decide to do it.

 

 

 

Excerpt from Jonathan’s upcoming book

 Beyond: Finding Freedom and Meaning in the Everyday

 

Web Marketing – Opportunity or Oxymoron

By: Norm MacLeod

If there was a movie about Web marketing it would probably be called A Shot In the Dark and the same words Inspector Clouseau used to sum up the original movie, “I believe everything, I believe nothing,” would also aptly apply.

 In the Office Products world, web marketing used to mean a number of boxed ads for randomly selected products spread around the landing page. These ads were funded by vendors usually out of the same pot that pays for flyers and catalogues. And was there a return on this investment?

You can choose either:

A) YES - 102,816 impressions over the month the ad appeared

B) NO - 14 clicks and possibly 3 sales actually attributable to the ad.  

 
Of course web marketing has evolved since then. Now we have stalker ads and search based personalized ads that are at least somewhat relevant to the customer. What’s that you say, you don’t really care that a Staples ad appears on Kijiji after you’ve been to their site and didn’t find either the item or price you were looking for? Rather than copying current fashionable ways of spending web dollars, perhaps our industry needs to concentrate more on finding marketing tools that genuinely benefit our particular breed of web customer.

For better or worse, our industry’s products really aren’t that emotionally important to our customers and ads for them will never be of much interest to anyone other than someone with that exact burning need the moment the ad is seen. So does that mean web marketing is a waste of money?

Based on the fact that the telemarketing industry still exists by trying to sell duct cleaning to everyone in the world with a land based phone, the shotgun approach must deliver some small percentage of success. But is there a way to turn web marketing funds into a higher percentage form of campaign, preferably one that is not annoying or intrusive to the customer? I believe the answer is a resounding YES.

The most effective use of Web marketing funds is to help the customer find what they are looking for even if they aren’t quite sure what that exactly is. Why is this the most effective spend? Because the decision about what to buy has not been made yet. People searching specifically, knowing what they want or shopping from a contract/favourites list, can’t be easily influenced. The decision making is already done. 

Imagine yourself as a customer shopping for an item. You know roughly what you want, be it a pen or a USB drive or a binder but you aren’t sure about brand or feature set. You enter the general item name into the search field and a scroll down of choices appears. At this point, it can either be eenie-meenie pick one at random or if some web marketing dollars have been allocated, specific products can be made more appealing.

For example, one of the items in the list could have a 30% off sale sign, or a $10 off coupon or a banner saying Customer Top Choice or ECO Choice. Another very simple and cheap approach is to make the item photo of the most profitable product more attractive than the ones around it, either bigger or with a more colourful background. A useful attention getter is a click for video demo icon or detailed fact sheet. The key at this point is to help the customer make a buying decision (even if it is on a paid for basis). At the very least, the search sequence should be based on some internal rationale, whether that is coop funding driven or dealer profitability driven.

So how do the big 3 industry web sites stack up? Totally at random, I selected the category of Retractable gel pens for a search, and here’s what I found on October 16^th, 11:30AM:

None of the sites attempted any direct marketing once the scroll down appeared, one site actually had no discernible sequence logic at all and included products that weren’t even in the selected category (a refill is NOT a pen). The other 2 sites had returns that were likely based on sales ranking as well as a directive to place private brand high in the list.

You would think that at least a boxed ad could appear relevant to the product group selected since all 3 of these sites run timed promotions which would usually have some product on sale in the selected category. It’s already on sale, how about letting the web customer know it up front rather than having to specifically sort by On Sale. How many vendors have tried to influence the sequence of the product scroll down, realizing that most customers aren’t going to get past about #10? How many vendors have demanded that when they coop for a promotion, the save amount be highlighted on the web search? How many vendors have proposed an aggressive cross sell campaign to dealers funding a switch over special offer if their product is not the first selected? How many vendors pay to ensure their collateral materials are used properly on the web site?

All of these web marketing tactics are well within the capabilities of the industry web sites. Dealers need to allocate more resources to their web activities, moving away from things like catalogues and flyers, to make them happen and if the dealers aren’t going to do it on their own, the vendors need to drive the process and ensure their marketing dollars are spent effectively. Otherwise, start buying shares in Amazon.