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Have you ever been sitting in a business review with your rep or supplier partner and thought, “What can I do to energize my partner to grow sales and market share?” Or, have you ever thought, “Why can’t my partner just grow sales or ship products faster so that we can beat our sales target?”

There are ways to use your supplier-rep partnership in order to achieve your personal or corporate objectives with respect to rep sales. There are several techniques you can learn and implement in order to achieve greater sales, faster sales growth, improved market share, or any other goal you might have of your sales channel relationship. The first principle that you must understand if you want to extract more out of your relationship is the correlation between partnership relationship and partnership success.

Virtuous Supplier-Rep Cycle

When your supplier-rep relationship grows, your supplier-rep partnership becomes more successful. When your supplier-rep partnership becomes more successful, your supplier-rep relationship grows. This is the virtuous supplier-rep cycle. That cycle repeats, and repeats, and repeats. That relationship is like a marriage—it can evolve and grow, or it can wither and die. More attention helps it grow. Less attention speeds its demise. Few supplier-rep relationships are static; they’re either growing or decaying. Understand where each of your supplier-rep relationships is in their life cycle. The health of the relationship is within your control. Improve the relationship, and celebrate its success. Ignore the relationship and watch success wither.

Manufacturers’ representatives and suppliers usually do more for their partners when they feel an emotional relationship with their partner. Think in terms of how you can become the emotional favorite of your supplier or rep partner. The objective in a supplier-rep relationship is to become the emotional favorite business partner. You may promote this technique by doing whatever it takes to demonstrate that your partner is your emotional favorite.

Why should a sales rep or manufacturer work hard enough to have its partner believe that it is its partner’s emotional favorite? In any high-performing supplier-rep relationship, both partners are each others’ emotional favorites. Although taking action to improve the relationship with your supplier or rep partner is hard work, that action yields great returns. Typical outcomes include improved sales performance, higher margins, greater commissions, and customers that are more satisfied and loyal.

How does a partner improve the supplier-rep relationship? Improvement requires the application of three forms of input. A partner has the opportunity to apply time, assorted resources, or money to the relationship. When a partner is relatively cash rich, it can choose to invest time, resources, or money. Financial pressures in lean times might prohibit application of money to the relationship and time might be the only available resource. A partner has the opportunity to adjust the relative share of time, resources and money applied to the relationship.

Customers are more likely to buy from a sales rep if it believes that there is a solid relationship between the supplier and sales rep. Seasoned customers understand that when problems arise (wrong parts shipped, late delivery, quality issues, etc.), resolution occurs fastest when there is a healthy relationship between the channel partners. Conversely, customers learn from experience that when the relationship is poor or strained, problem resolution occurs more slowly.

Communication

In recent years, with constant pressure on margins and resulting thinner organizations, it’s easy to fall into the trap of reducing or minimizing personal contact. Minimizing personal contact, however, too easily leads to diminished cooperation in relationships between manufacturers and sales reps. Communication is the glue that holds the working relationship together. A sales relationship thrives on personal interaction. Frequent communication with your partner not only boosts sales, but can also give you valuable industry or supply insight and leads on opportunities about which you would not have otherwise learned. You must converse frequently and clearly. Although e-mail and text messaging have increased as a share of overall communications in recent years, it’s important to remember that face-to-face communication is the best and most effective method of developing or expanding personal relationships between suppliers and reps.

Not all messages need to be about significant topics. If your company has just done something to enhance the relationship, whatever that might be, pick up the phone and tell your partner. While on the call, ask the question: “What else may I do for you?” People easily forget one phone call. A string of calls fall into a routine. That routine can differentiate you and your company from other business partners, and reinforce the notion that your partner is your emotional favorite; and that you are your partner’s emotional favorite. Business runs on emotion. Take advantage of it. Leverage the emotional relationship in order to get more out of your partnership.

People conduct business with people they like and trust. Become the people with whom your partner likes and trusts to do business. In order for a sales rep to deliver optimal sales performance, sales commissions alone are inadequate. The supplier must demonstrate recognition that the sales rep is a highly qualified professional or team of professionals that the supplier respects. That respect helps build likability and trust. Building likability and trustworthiness with your selling partner is well worth the effort as it pays big dividends. Make sure that you apply the time and energy to make your rep or supplier feel special.

Five-Point Management Meeting

Sales reps and suppliers meet frequently. Those meetings might be monthly, quarterly or annual business reviews. All partners have preferred formats for the information exchanged in those reviews. Several years ago, as a rookie vice president of sales, I prepared to meet with the CEO of my company’s largest client. Once I completed the material that I planned to share with that CEO, I called his vice president and asked that he review my presentation, critique it, and offer amendments so that I might guarantee a successful meeting. After presenting the material to the vice president, he suggested that I discard the entire presentation and replace it with a simple five-point format. Although his suggestion shocked me, I had great respect for him and proceeded to create a completely new set of presentation material. I now take this opportunity to share those five points with you.

1. Let me explain what we’ve done for you since our last meeting.
2. What priorities would you like us to engage in during the months ahead?
3. Your sales of our products are very important to us and here’s why.
4. Here is what we would like to see from you in the months ahead.
5. Let me explain what we plan to do for you in the months ahead.

The five-point program is simple and easily understood. It reinforces the people-to-people nature of the supplier-rep relationship, as opposed to a less personal company-to-company relationship. Feel free to add numbers, charts and graphs to support each of these five points. Don’t lose sight, however, that the five points drive your presentation. Data merely supports your five points. During and after my first use of this plan, I determined that the process works much better than a program in which both partners pass stacks of data back and forth across a table. Routine use of the five-point plan differentiates one partner from all of the rest. More importantly, the more personalized program allows partners to reinforce their likability and trustworthiness.

Four Eyes vs. Two Eyes

Most representative agreements benefit from review by people experienced with creating and negotiating contracts. Sometimes attorneys review the contracts. Sometimes sales managers with contract experience review the contracts. The best results come when a both legal professional and a seasoned sales manager review the representative agreement simultaneously.

When a legal professional (and not a seasoned sales manager), reviews a rep contract, the resulting document can be legally acceptable, but commercially ineffective. When a seasoned sales manager (and not an attorney), reviews a contract, the resulting agreement can be commercially effective, but legally unacceptable. When only two eyes review a sales channel agreement, problems can arise. When, however, four eyes review an agreement, a pair from an attorney and a pair from a seasoned sales manager, the probability of a legal skirmish upon termination diminishes greatly. Four eyes are better than two eyes.

Conclusion

In order to get more out of your channel relationship, remember these five steps:

• Place increasing amounts of energy into the relationship.
• Become the emotional favorite of your partner.
• Ensure that your partner likes and trusts the people in your organization.
• Ensure that your partner believes that it is your emotional favorite.
• Use the five-point management meeting outline at every opportunity.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].