by Jerry Leth, Vice-President and General Manager, MANA
I help many of our manufacturer members do RepFinder® searches to create lists of manufacturers’ representatives they can contact to see if they are interested in selling their products or services.
Most, but not all, of the results that come up look attractive but I also see a fair number of results that are unlikely to be contacted by the manufacturers.
For example, when the manufacturer downloads the results into an Excel file, a number of cells in the “ProdSerDesc” column are blank. The first thing the searcher does is to delete those with blank “ProdSerDesc” cells. If you do not tell them what you do, why would they want to contact you?
Another thing the searcher wants to know is if you have enough salespeople or sub-reps collaborating with you to cover your territory. I do see one-person manufacturers’ representatives in the results that cover all of North America. They also are unlikely to be contacted by searchers. If you are a one-person manufacturers’ representative and selected all those states and provinces because you expect to come up in more searches, you are correct. However, the question you need to ask yourself is “Based on what the manufacturer learns about you, what are the chances they will contact you?
A valuable tool to help in this process is a website, and over 80 percent of MANA members have one. Many of the searchers also delete those with blank website cells.
The ones who do get contacted by the searchers are those who provide an informative description of their business and what they do. They also include a link to their website, where the manufacturer can learn a lot more about them. They also employ a reasonable number of sales employees or partner with sub-reps to cover the size of their territory.
So, if you want MANA manufacturer members who are looking for representatives to contact you, check out your profile and make sure that it provides what I described above.
Jerry Leth, MANA’s vice-president and general manager, started as membership manager in August 2000. Previously, he owned and operated Letco Tech Sales, Inc., a MANA member, multi-line professional outsourced sales agency he founded in 1989. Before starting his own agency, he managed a network of manufacturers’ reps as vice-president of sales and marketing for torque and tension equipment. Leth graduated from Stanford with a mechanical engineering degree. He started his career at Hills Brothers Coffee in San Francisco in engineering and production before embarking on a sales career.