Independent Sales Agents are a nice option

If your company doesn’t have the fat sales and marketing budget to build and support a direct sales force with full geographic coverage in N. America BUT you want to maintain a higher degree of control than a typical VAR channel will allow then Independent Sales Agents (ISA’s) are a nice option.  You can plug the holes in your geographic coverage with Independent Sales Agents who are married to their customers and have little to no infrastructure.  Typically, they only have a few customers but they know them cold - they know the buying cycles and process, they know where the money is, they know where the administration is focusing their time and attention, they have personal relationships with many of the key decision makers in the district.  They are very loyal to their customers and place their vendor relationships second.

An ISA will usually operate without infrastructure.  That means that pre-sales support, sales administration (accepting P.O.s and invoicing), customer training, professional development and implementation support is going to need to come from the vendor.  Perfect for those companies that want / need to maintain a high level of control and count on services dollars to bolster their revenue line.  The question is - do you have the infrastructure to support this model?  If yes, then how many ISA’s can you handle and where?

I’ll be writing quite a bit more about ISA’s over the coming weeks so stay tuned for more if this topic is of interest. 

Post written by Toby Nangle on 4:07am, August 31, 2010
Filed in: | Leave a comment