The time has come for me to take the succession planning advice I have often given to manufacturers’ reps.

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It has been my honor to serve as MANA’s CEO since 2011 and to help celebrate MANA’s 65th, 70th, and 75th anniversaries. But MANA’s future anniversaries, and there will be many, will be celebrated with a new CEO at the helm.

My thanks to MANA’s Board of Directors and staff for making it possible for MANA to support our community of reps and manufacturers with activities like:

• Developing the industry-leading platform for connecting reps and manufacturers.
• Championing Market Development Fees to both manufacturers and reps.
• Challenging 30-day termination clauses as a standard way to work with reps.

It is a bittersweet reality that my goal as a retiring CEO is to leave the association in such good hands that I will be remembered fondly but not missed organizationally. Your new CEO will take MANA to the next level. No one will be cheering more loudly from the sidelines than me.

As a reminder that CEO succession is the nature of things, I close with this 1949 message from the first person to have my role at MANA, P. Edwin Thomas:

The members of this National Association extend to you a sincere invitation to help make this Agent and Representative magazine* the “Common Meeting Place,” in the interests of “Economical Distribution” of the products of those who specialize in production but who, by size of circumstance, are not equipped, or prefer not to equip, to handle the selling function in all of its many ramifications and extenuations.

Manufacturers’ Agents, as “independent contractors and free agents,” are free from many of the restrictions applicable to private salesmen, in interstate and intrastate commerce, and their employment as a satisfactory sales outlet is every day being recognized by more and more producers and suppliers in every part of the country and in every industry.

* Later renamed Agency Sales magazine.

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Last month I started a discussion about why Artificial Intelligence (AI) won’t be the end of reps. This month I share two stories that show why AI can’t replace reps.

AI Can’t Ask for a Favor

Someone at my principal in Europe decided to ship mounting hardware by ocean freight (eight-week delivery) instead of air freight (two-week delivery), so mounting hardware stock dropped to zero for six weeks. The factory’s message: “Tell your customers they have to wait.”

My principal’s products were useless without mounting hardware and customers’ production lines were shut down.

My largest customer was about to switch vendors. So I called another customer who had ample mounting hardware and asked for a favor. “I need to borrow 1,000 meters of mounting hardware for a month.” That customer let me borrow that hardware and I saved my largest customer. AI can’t do that.

AI Won’t Push Back

My largest customer had a rule. If you don’t increase your prices, you get to keep the business.

Every year my principal announced a routine 5 percent price increase. Every year I pushed back because prices in this product category actually were going down, and if the customer shopped around, they could get the same product for 30-40 percent less. Every year the factory backed off and this became one of their most profitable customers.

Then a sales manager who never met the customer took the account away from me and gave it to a direct salesperson 700 miles from the customer. And, when the factory announced its annual 5 percent price increase, the direct salesperson did exactly what he was told and insisted on the increase.

The customer found a new source for half the price.

AI is just like that direct salesperson. It does exactly what you tell it to do. Unlike AI, reps will push back when the factory does something foolish.

AI can’t do jobs that require trust and independent thinking. Those jobs will always go to reps.

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A sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.
— Alan Turing, English computer scientist widely considered to be the father of artificial intelligence.

Will there always be reps?

That’s a question that I was asked when reps’ role delivering three-ring engineering binders was upended by online access to technical data on manufacturers’ websites.

That’s a question I was asked when online quotations and order entry processes eliminated many clerical tasks in reps’ offices.

And now it’s the question I am asked because Artificial Intelligence (AI) disrupts some services traditionally provided by reps.

What happened to reps when three-ring engineering binders faded away? Reps evolved! Reps became guides who helped customers drink from the fire hose of data suddenly available from manufacturers’ websites.

What happened when online quotations and e-commerce disrupted manual processes previously handled in reps’ offices? Reps evolved! Reps removed from their line cards some of the commodity product manufacturers who only valued reps for quoting and order entry services. Reps shifted their resources to launching CRM systems that let them give better information to their principals and better anticipate their customers’ needs.

What will happen as AI disrupts other aspects of the services reps provide?

AI will increasingly be adopted for roles that don’t require face-to-face contact. Reps will evolve and refocus their resources on roles that do require face-to-face contact.

• Reps will spend more time doing site visits to help solve their customers’ problems by integrating multiple products from their line cards into custom solutions.
• Reps will spend more time teaching and coaching their customers’ employees on the functions and applications of their principals’ products.
• Reps will be the conduit for insights and expertise they developed while solving one customer’s problems to be applied to their other customers’ problems.

Yes, there will always be reps, because reps are customers’ trusted face-to-face resources. And that is a role that websites, e-commerce or AI never can provide.

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“I put $3 million down that hole in the ground and never heard it hit bottom.” — Thomas Edison

When we think of Thomas Edison, we think of his successes. The electric light. The record player. But in 1881 he spent $3,000,000 to build machinery that he thought could extract iron from rocks that had only moderate iron content.

The Edison Ore-Milling Company never was profitable, and the money he put down that hole in the ground was equivalent to $90,000,000 in 2024 dollars.

Reps, like Edison, often have ventures that put their money into a hole in the ground. But, for reps, their “hole in the ground” is representing lines that bring in $50 for every $100 the reps spend promoting the line.

Reps, unlike Edison, can benefit from the experiences of their colleagues who burned daylight on lines that were never profitable and almost always say they let the situation go on for months or years longer than they should have.

And MANA membership includes a tool rep members can use to take the emotion out of assessing lines that might not belong on their line cards, MANA’s Line Card Profitability Analysis Workbook.

What’s in the Line Card Profitability Workbook?

• An assessment tool that takes into account a line’s income and the degree to which it really fits a rep’s line card.
• A step-by-step assessment example that makes the tool easy to follow.
• Adjustments for a line’s intangible contributions to a rep firm.
• Real-world case studies of reps who discovered one of their lines did not belong on their line card.

Ready to do line card profitability analysis on your line card? Download MANA’s Line Card Profitability Analysis Workbook in the member area of the MANA website, www.MANAonline.org, look for “Publications,” and also watch our 12-minute YouTube video, Line Card Profitability Analysis.

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“Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding, but they should remember that human felicity is produced by little advantages that occur every day.”
— Benjamin Franklin

What did Franklin mean? One example dates back to the days when America was still a British colony.

Streets were lit at night by oil lamps, with the flame protected from the wind by blown glass globes. Franklin observed two issues with that practice:

1. Breakage was a problem because blown glass globes had to be imported from England, a time-consuming and costly process.
2. Soot from the flame darkened the globes, reducing the illumination they provided.

Franklin designed a replacement for the globes with four panes of flat glass. When street lamps were damaged, flat glass to repair them was readily available. His design also left an open chimney at the top to let soot escape before the glass was darkened.

I can share two more modern examples of small changes from MANA’s journey to advance the professionalism and use of independent manufacturers’ representatives:

1. By capturing statistical data from searches in MANA’s RepFinder® database, we now send quarterly emails to rep members to let them know how many times their firm appeared in the results of RepFinder® searches.
2. We had so many best practices resources available to reps and manufacturers that finding the resources they needed was challenging for our members. So VP & GM Jerry Leth curated our resources to let members view our most important online resources.

• For reps, “Steps to Rep Professionalism.”
• For manufacturers, “Steps to Selling Through Independent Reps.”

Little changes like these can be just as important to MANA members as breakthroughs like MANA’s launch of the first rep search smartphone app.

What kinds of small changes could you make that would make a big difference to your customers or partners?

Do you have an example to share? Reach out to me by email at [email protected] with the details.

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When manufacturers call me looking for help finding reps, I suggest that they take a lesson from gold miners. If you are looking for gold, start by looking for quartz.

Gold often occurs in between quartz crystals. Looking for quartz can help you find gold you otherwise would have missed.

How do you look for “quartz” during a rep search? Let me give you an example, and for the sake of this example, I will oversimplify.

Let’s say you’re a manufacturer of nails. You do a search for reps who sell nails and the list is disappointingly short.

It’s actually even worse than that, because the reps you found who sell nails already have a built-in conflict on their line card. They already represent a nail manufacturer: when you call them, many can’t represent you too.

Instead, you need to look for “quartz,” and search for reps who sell fasteners. Now you find reps who sell screws, nuts and bolts, but don’t have a line of nails. Perfect fit! But just a start.

Broadening the search, you also search for reps who sell complementary non-competing products. This takes some thoughtful reflection on your part. What kinds of reps would have great contacts to sell nails? Reps who sell hand tools, like hammers, would have great contacts to sell nails.

I suggest that manufacturers ask themselves, and perhaps some of their best customers, “In addition to my products, what else do my best customers buy?” Then they can get some categories that give better results.

If you are a manufacturer who needs help finding reps or a rep who needs help getting found by manufacturers, reach out to MANA by email at [email protected].