It’s always interesting to note the fairly circuitous routes various individuals have taken on their career paths to become independent manufacturers’ representatives. In years past Agency Sales has detailed how everyone from former professional athletes, teachers and even an FBI agent went on to carve out successful careers in independent sales. In hindsight, when looking at the course Mark Conley has followed to become President and CEO of O’Donnell Associates North, Inc., his initial steps into the waters of sales make perfect sense.

According to Conley, who heads the San Jose, California-based agency that serves the Northern California and North Western Nevada electronics marketplace, his journey to independent representative began during college while selling sporting goods in a busy retail store during summers and Christmas breaks. “I loved sales because it provided me a wonderful avenue to meet with new people and help them choose products that were best suited for them.” He adds that during his last two college years he was fully employed with a California state assemblyman. “Politics is a constant sale — making sure we were always selling our assemblyman whether as a representative of the community or as a candidate continuously running for office.”

If selling and politics laid the foundation for a beginning, his true professional career began when he started working as a buyer for Sperry Univac. After just one year there and admittedly “loving” the job, he was offered a position at O’Donnell North as a manufacturers’ representative. “O’Donnell North was selling products to me at Sperry. The manager of the O’Donnell North sales office took a liking to me and thought I had a good chance of being a rep. I’ve been with the company ever since.” That was 36 years ago.

Entering a Different Environment

When asked if there were any eye-opening experiences when he left the world of manufacturing for that of the independent sales agency, Conley explains that perhaps the biggest adjustment he faced was that “I was going from being a small fish in a big pond to where I’d be the big fish in a small pond. Having said that, it was a much more intimate environment and I realized immediately that my success or failure would be up to me and no one else.”

In describing the agency he’s been with closing on four decades, Conley says that O’Donnell North “…has always been focused on electro-mechanical components, shying away from active semiconductors. Like my predecessor, Tim O’Donnell, I believe strongly in creating a family atmosphere within the company and providing a stable and secure environment for our team members to work in. Over the years I have watched many rep firms come and go as the result of betting on either semiconductor products or other volatile components. We have always preferred slow and steady growth over explosive growth.”

Meeting the Challenge of Change

As agents in just about any other industry can attest, Conley notes that over the course of his career he and his agency have faced the challenge of change. “In so many ways,” he maintains, “the business environment has changed and yet one major piece has not changed. A direct salesperson, with an average longevity of just over two years in his/her job, cannot hold a candle to a dependable rep company in an established territory. What a rep brings are experience, product knowledge, a commitment to a territory and the customer base, and myriad other assets that a direct salesperson can’t live up to.”

Conley maintains that the need for the agent to communicate his value and educate his principals as to what he does is “More important today than ever before. As our industry has matured, profit margins have gone down and the global economy has greatly impacted us. There are a lot of guys sitting in factories making financial decisions in a vacuum. Many of them think that by having their own (direct) sales force that they have more control and will spend less. That’s just not the case.

“Whether they are receptive or not to what I have to tell them, it really depends on the CEO or whomever is in charge of the company. If on the one hand, they’re of the ilk to be supportive of the rep concept, then everyone in the company is. If, on the other hand, the CEO is not supportive or is much more wanting to be in control and is someone who tends to believe in a direct sales force, the entire organization will probably feel the same way.

“I’d say that the greatest changes and challenges over the last 10 or more years have been the impact of the global economy on design and manufacturing and the impact that CRM-based systems have had on available selling time. Manufacturers’ need for more data is insatiable and, as a result, most regional sales managers today are nothing more than glorified data entry clerks (a true waste of talent). On the other end, customers are more pressed for time than ever before as the result of shrinking time and, thus, are more difficult to see face to face. By their nature, representatives offer many customers a ‘one-stop shopping experience’ that respects the time challenges of most customers.”

When it comes to addressing those and other challenges, Conley explains that “One of the real beauties of being a rep is being able to overcome those challenges. One of our major functions as independent agents is to shield manufacturers from their own foibles. For instance, if a manufacturer has an incomplete or bad website, then their customers come to us for help. We shield manufacturers from ills they might have, whether it’s that website, quality or delivery problems. We’ll always jump in, solve the problem and rarely tell the manufacturer that the customer might have an issue — that’s why we’re here.

“In addition, as reps we have relationships with customers for 20, 30 and even 40 years. The truth is that customers trust us because we’ve been in the territory for all those years. Compare and contrast that with the direct guy who typically is on the job for two years and then gone. We worked hard to establish that credibility and that allows us to meet those challenges.

Social Media and IT

Two additional important changes he notes are the proliferation of social media and the need for sophisticated IT to get the job done. According to Conley, considering social media first, “That’s been one of our larger disappointments. Social media activity tends to take a backseat to all other things we do. If anything, our website remains our primary interface with customers. We used to make use of it to market ourselves to manufacturers, but we found that wasn’t the best thing to do.”

Of the three major social media tools (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook) Conley says LinkedIn has proven the most valuable. “Facebook is primarily for social interactions and we don’t make much use of Twitter. If I see any Twitter interactions, it’s maybe one or twice a week. With LinkedIn, however, we’ve found a concrete use. If we have a customer in the early stages of development, for instance, LinkedIn can be a great help in locating employees who have a say in the decision making.”

On the subject of Information Technology and CRM, he explains “Most of our IT needs are related to CRM. What we’ve done in that area is to outsource it to a company that hosts our data and software. They have all of that under control.”

According to Conley, O’Donnell doesn’t have a constant need to actively solicit new product lines. “Occasionally, however, we will identify a product that we need to add to our product mix and we will look at the best companies in the business who produce that product. If they do not have representation in the area, we may decide to pursue them. However, most of our new principals usually come to us as a result of our customers recommending us to them. Some find us via our web presence but we prefer our website to be customer-oriented rather than a marketing engine for our company to get new product lines.”

One of the tools O’Donnell has been able to make use of when it comes to meeting the aforementioned challenges — and others — is its membership and participation in MANA. According to Conley, “The nature of MANA is unique. Independent manufacturers’ representatives of all persuasions are members — whether it be a plumbing expert, a sporting goods representative, or an electronics rep, the diversity is great, providing me a greater opportunity to learn how people deal with situations in different ways. The networking opportunities as a result of this diversity of membership are endless.”

While it sounds as if membership in MANA is one of the better decisions Conley and the agency made, he goes on to note that “I think that the best thing I’ve ever done as a rep is to treat others the way I would like to be treated. From a strictly business perspective, on the other hand, it’s perhaps our willingness to let go of a principal regardless of their largesse or contributions to our agency. We’ve done this with large companies, companies with household names. We’ve done this in cases when they were not paying us fairly, abusing us or taking us for granted in the relationship. In one case we actually had a principal who had a major customer move from San Jose to Mexico and the next month they stopped paying us commissions, saying they couldn’t track shipments. Perhaps the message here for other reps is to not be hesitant to part company with a principal no matter how large when the agency would be better served to go in a different direction.”

Finally the agency executive is asked to take a look back at his career and offer an opinion as to whether he’d do anything differently. His response: “For the most part I think I would do things the same. The best advice I ever received was to follow my heart with a strong sense of logic. Most important, the Golden Rule has served me very well — ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ My biggest challenges have always come when times were tough and decisions that were not fun had to be made. However, as I have discovered time and time again, making those decisions in a timely manner, always made things better in the long run.”

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The O’Donnell North File

In 1963, Timothy P. O’Donnell founded O’Donnell Associates North. Several years later he moved to Southern California to continue the operation from there. At the time, the aerospace business was strong and Southern California was the dominant territory serving this important market segment.

In 1972, O’Donnell incorporated three different companies, one in Northern California, one in Southern California, and one in Phoenix, Arizona. Realizing that his company had grown significantly and that each of his three operations was substantively different from one another, creating three separate companies made sense. In 1979, Mark Conley joined the Northern California operation after a stint with the Sperry Univac Corporation.

In 1986, O’Donnell North acquired Abbott Engineering and with that acquisition of Abbott, came Jay Abbott. Immediately following the acquisition of Abbott Engineering, Conley and Abbott began the process of purchasing O’Donnell Associates North, Inc. from Timothy O’Donnell and Cliff Bird.

In 1991, the acquisition of O’Donnell North was completed. In the same time frame, Timothy O’Donnell sold his two other rep firms to employees located in the respective companies (Phoenix and Southern California). At this time, the three rep companies had no common ownership or interest in each other.

In 2001, Abbott retired from the company. In 2006, Charlie Brenner, an employee since 1986, became a full partner in the firm.

O’Donnell North’s territory includes Silicon Valley, The North Coast, The Central Valley, Reno/Carson City and Hawaii. The agency continues to grow on average, 15 percent per year. Today the company employs 13 individuals and is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, five minutes from San Jose International Airport.

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