Some Great, some you know..

Imagine if your customers needed weeks of extensive emails and phone calls just to make a sale on three cigars (or boxes of cigars). Then after all that, there is a technical issue with the cigars (they keep unrolling) and the customer is flooding you with phone calls and emails demanding service immediately (rightly so). In my field, it’s common for 3 or 4 days of turnaround time as their engineers try to replicate the problem and diagnose it and put together something at least marginally useful for the customer to do short of shipping everything back and waiting weeks for it to be returned, fixed.

Of course, my company has commission-based reps too (in fact we are usually dealing directly with manufacturing engineers and managers at our vendors’ businesses). They’re usually pretty good but everyone has issues at some point. Occasionally we get a rep who starts repping for another distribution company and his attention becomes a bit too short to deal with all his obligations with us. That’s not really fair to anyone. I realize it’s quite a bit different since the reps you deal with are employees of the cigar manufacturers but ours are purely on commission which makes their attention tend towards whichever distributor’s products are selling best at any given time. It just introduces a whole other level of complexity and frustration for both the distributor and the customer. By the same token, our good reps are what keeps the company strong.

I guess the point in all of this is that the more things are different, the more they are the same. Our two markets couldn’t be more different. When the two main factors in a rep’s time management decisions are money and time, good communication can be a very, very distant third.