Your Website Bites!

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I have just returned from a relatively random tour of the world — rep sites on the World Wide Web. What a downer! With rare exceptions, the manufacturers’ representative community has failed to harness the potential of the Internet to serve the (varying) interests of individual firms, nor have very many steered visitors to the information about the rep function on the sites of their associations — MANA, NEMRA, ERA, etc., much less “sold the system” on their own sites.

I find the failure of professional field sales organizations to do any meaningful online selling particularly surprising because so many … Read the rest

Websites in the “RoHS” Age

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In the spirit of the ‘RoHS’ (recycling of hazardous substances) age, let me ask reps the question: “Will your current website meet the expectations of 2008? Before offering an answer, let’s note that reps are creating their own hazards and avoiding end-of-life considerations for their websites by perpetuating rather than replacing sites that are essentially obsolete. It still seems true that many sites seem to be the same ones that were posted at the dawn of the Internet age (although the graphics look more dated than that). Here’s my answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paragraph: … Read the rest