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Newbie, newb, noob, nub or n00b is a slang term for a novice or newcomer, or somebody inexperienced in a profession or activity. Depending upon the context and spelling variant used, the term can have derogatory connotations — but is also often used for descriptive purposes only, without any value judgment.

With a little help from Google we have a starting point.

New people joining a rep firm are generally totally lost. If your firm doesn’t have a solid, highly structured game plan for a new person coming in to either the sales or customer service areas they will surely fail.

Telling someone who is new to the independent rep business to take a few catalogs home and read them is the start of disaster.

Criteria for Hiring?

Why did you hire the person? Everyone has a sense of what it takes to become successful in the rep business.

One thing is for sure, a new salesperson or customer service rep has to have the ability to “keep a lot of balls in the air at one time.”

The rep business is not simple. A lot of stuff hits the fan quite often. In order to be successful, the new person needs to build a knowledge base and build personal confidence that he or she is comfortable dealing with the important things that are a part of the rep firm’s everyday business.

Multiple-Line Selling Is Not an Everyday, Common Term With Meaning for Most New Hires

Multiple-line selling is the fundamental building block in the rep business, but it is totally foreign to most people.

How do we introduce multiple-line selling? Efficiency is the starting point for introducing multiple-line selling — the point of multiple-line selling is to make the time a seller gets from a customer more effective and efficient.

If you have only one line to sell, life is easy. That is why people can become salespeople; not necessarily good salespeople, but certainly they can pass for a salesperson if they work as a direct salesperson for one manufacturer.

But, if the person is to be successful working for a rep, he or she has to understand how to move from line to line during a short period of time.

Where Does a Salesperson Start to Become a Multiple‑Line Salesperson?

The answer is with the catalogs and training by factory personnel. The starting point is what does it mean to have a package of compatible lines?

Understanding how different lines work with each other — the lines are non-competitive. The lines are clearly compatible with an easy-to-understand presentation. Presentation skills are a major building block for a new salesperson.

If a person working for your rep firm doesn’t give a good presentation they will never succeed as a salesperson.

The new salesperson must be able to stand in front of a group of dealer salespeople or purchasers and know that he or she is going to be one of the best speakers they have heard and be not only informative, but also entertaining.

Evaluations From Day One!

The only way a salesperson becomes proficient and successful is to be evaluated. No one from your firm should conduct a sales meeting with customers without providing an evaluation/rating form to everyone in the audience. They should make every effort to collect the evaluations and get them sent to the home office to be reviewed and scored.

Backselling Your Firm’s Presentations

There is no more powerful tool for telling the companies a rep firm represents that the salespeople are doing the job than a huge pile of evaluations of the sales meetings that have been held by the rep firm. Nothing is more valuable than the face-to-face time salespeople get to do lunch and learn presentations, formal sales meetings, product demonstrations, and all of the other presentation situations the rep should be obtaining with the customers. This is especially true when the manufacturers whose lines a rep firm carries are frequently introducing new products or making substantial improvements in products.

The rep firm is the branch office of the manufacturer in the market. There should always be a knowledge that reps are part of the company. With a new salesperson training has to include a thorough presentation of the manufacturer’s history, market focus and key personnel.

The new person will succeed only if the rep firm has a plan and a structured training program and approach.

Good luck and good selling.

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