Manufacturers’ rep best practices

by Tom Griffin, CPMR
ERA President

We spend a lot of time at Catalyst Unity Solutions working on and promoting our brand, and ensuring our employees own the brand. An important part of this effort is communicating to new employees, and reminding experienced employees, about best practices. These include everything from call reports to emails, virtual meetings and principal visits and reviews.

Our best practices presentation has remained unchanged for years, until recently. Ken Bellero, formerly of Schaffner and a member of the ERA Executive Committee, assembled ERA’s Manufacturers Executive Council for its ideas on what they view as rep best practices.

Their list is brief, but impactful.

Rep digital marketing programs come highly recommended by the group. The group agreed these programs should be funded by the reps, but support materials should be provided by the manufacturer.

Rep report cards — The Council requested to start a process to standardize manufacturers’ rep report cards. The idea is to use these as a guideline for rep performance. It should include targets based on opportunities.

Succession planning is a best practice for both reps and manufacturers. Both parties should work to have a plan in place, and communicate that plan regularly.

Rep website content standardization — The Council agreed that manufacturers’ rep websites should include a listing of all their lines, and even links back to the manufacturers’ sites.

The work of this group resulted in our company improving our presentations, as well as adding this list to our best practices presentation shared internally.

I hope you find the work of this prestigious group as beneficial as we at Catalyst did. Our thanks to ERA Manufacturers Council members Ken Bellero, Caroline Wells, Holly Good, Robert Derringer, David Bennington and Bob Gourdeau.