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Buying, Selling and Merging of Rep Companies

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It is often said that in one’s personal life the most important financial decisions have to do with buying or selling a home. For a manufacturers’ representative, perhaps the most important decision in your financial life has to do with buying or selling a rep company. Some enter the rep business by either buying into or buying out an existing rep company. And upon retirement, the only way to benefit from the value of the rep company you’ve built is to sell it — sometimes to a family member, sometimes to an employee or employees, and sometimes to an outside … Read the rest

Editorial…In the Field

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Mel is back!

Long-term MANA members will remember receiving Mel Daskal’s monthly Financial Fax newsletter. I’m sure that those who are acquainted with it will be delighted to know that Financial Fax will appear as a regular column in future issues of Agency Sales magazine. The first column actually appeared in last month’s issue in case you missed it.

If you’re new to Financial Fax, you will soon learn that you won’t want to miss a single issue, and you’ll probably find yourself passing your copy of Agency Sales along for others to read.

In addition to the return … Read the rest

Looking for Reps?

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Looking for reps? It may not be as easy as it appears.

Depending upon a manufacturer’s level of experience in working with manufacturers’ representatives (reps, agents, representatives, professional field sales companies, outsourced sales professionals), there are several options available to find prospects to sell products.

If the manufacturer already has an established rep network, existing representatives may be an excellent source for recommendations for candidates in new or open territories. Many professional representatives are well-acquainted with reps in other territories through sales meetings, rep councils, rep trade associations, and professional and technical conferences.

Even if the manufacturer hasn’t established a … Read the rest

Software for Manufacturers’ Representatives

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This issue of Agency Sales magazine includes a report on software for manufacturers’ representatives, the first such report MANA has done in four years. The most significant changes evident in this report compared to our last one in 2002 are:

  • The number of software providers who responded to our survey declined from 18 to 14.
  • Fourteen of the 18 providers listed in our 2002 report are missing in the 2006 report.
  • Only four of the software providers who responded to our 2002 survey appear in the 2006 report, the other 10 are new.

Although the number of rep software providers … Read the rest

Editorial in the Field

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What do you do when you get a telephone call from a new MANA associate member, and it becomes immediately obvious that he is new to working with reps? He doesn’t have a clue about how things work with outsourced sales professionals. For most of us, our immediate response is to tell the principal that we are not in a position to take on any additional suppliers right now and politely end the conversation as quickly as possible.

But what if we took just a few minutes to point the supplier toward some easily accessible resources that would immensely improve … Read the rest