When a manufacturer’s sales executive visits a territory, the rules of engagement are to set up key calls for the exec’s product line. It’s a bit challenging because a rep is probably selling or promoting more than one line at most of the key accounts. The advantage of the rep’s line card synergy is lost. Adding to the challenge is the scheduling coordination efforts with multiple salespeople involved in the visit. However, I did have one principal that made it much easier for us. While he wanted us to make calls at key accounts for his products, he wanted us to feel free to promote and discuss all of our lines. As he put it, he didn’t want to get in our way and he wanted to see us in action selling synergistically.
His view was that our line card was a strategic advantage to his company going to market. He felt he was leveraging the marketing efforts and the product offering of the other lines by selling through reps. In fact, on one sales call I vividly recall he brought up one of our other lines during the course of the conversation with a prospect. In my 20 years as a rep — repping over 20 different lines during that time — he’s the only factory executive who encouraged multi-line selling during his visits.
On the other hand, one morning I took a call from the CEO of one of our other lines — line ABC. He told me that he and the VP of Sales felt we were spending too much time on line XYZ (he was specific). We were ABC’s #1 rep agency, and in fact were responsible for over 50 percent of their revenues and about 80 percent of their growth over a five year period. I just blew off the call as one of those management traps — punish the good workers by giving them more work because they are the only ones who seem to get things done. I am not kidding you when I tell you that very night I took a call from the regional manager of XYZ. He was calling to complain — you guessed it — that we were spending too much time on ABC’s line. That actually took some serious wind out of my sails, mainly because I had to resign myself to the fact that “they just don’t get it and they never will.”
I left the rep world in 1998, and after 13 years delivering several hundred education programs with a couple thousand sales executives, I realize a lot of executives who go to market via reps view the rest of the rep’s line card as competition for their time. They see line cards not as synergistic, but more like each line gets its “turn” in the selling process. Selling synergistic lines is not a series event, it is a parallel-kitted solutions sale. Furthermore, multiple lines allow the rep agency multiple opportunities and multiple entry points with every prospect. What is the value of time saved by the other lines that make it easier to get in to a prospect? Or the fact that the rep is serving as a one-stop shopping solution for the buyer? The rep’s line card has significantly higher time value than any line would have standing alone — so to ask for a specific amount of a rep’s time is to diminish the value of the rep’s selling time.
Rather than viewing the other lines as competition, why not think about leveraging the other lines to an advantage? Line Card Leverage used strategically by each manufacturer would provide the ultimate win-win-win scenario: win for the customer; win for the rep agency; win for the manufacturer.
Let’s assume a rep has 10 lines on their line card. Which is more productive: to have each line fight the rep’s time, or to view the tremendous breadth of offering of the whole line card and take advantage of it, to use a Line Card Leverage strategy?
