The Role of the Rep

July 31, 2007  by in UnCategorized   

By Home Furnishings Business in Furniture Retailing on August 2007 A lot of furniture retailers find themselves filling a number of roles for their customer base, and when it comes to training their sales personnel, manufacturer representatives bring insights that can help retail floors perform better not only for the owner, but also the vendor.

Take Garden City Furniture, for example. The Garden City Beach, S.C., store is smack in the middle of a very traditional market, but one that also caters to vacation home owners seeking more casual styles by virtue of its coastal location.

“Right now we’re selling a lot of outdoor looks, but we also have customers who are looking for the traditional plantation bed,” said Garden City President Dianne Ray, whose father founded the business almost 30 years ago after opening his first store in Conway, S.C. in 1947. “Reps need to do their homework on individual stores and know what products are important to us.”

In Garden City’s case, that’s a diverse mix of product that ranges from Bernhardt and Ekornes at the high end to beach resort looks reflecting its market on the Atlantic Coast. Reps’ ability to train the folks on the showroom floor to sell their product, though, varies greatly among Ray’s vendors. That’s why she’s a big proponent of a rep training program through the International Home Furnishings Representatives Association.

“The difference between reps who’ve gone through IHFRA’s training program and those who haven’t is night and day,” she said. “Reps who have (been trained) ask the right questions about how they can better assist their customers. Their time is as valuable as ours, and I highly recommend to reps that they take advantage of that program. You can tell when a rep knows his or her lines. Some of them really study the line and are good at it, but some have too many lines in their bag, and it shows.”

Training the Trainers

Leslie Carothers is founder and principal of The Kaleidoscope Partnership, a national creative designer sales training and strategic consulting firm for retailers and manufacturers based in the Sarasota, Fla., area. She currently is training Hooker Furniture Corp.’s sales representatives and working with the International Home Furnishings Representatives Associa-tion on that group’s certification program for furniture sales reps.

She sees plenty of room for improvement in the way manufacturer sales representatives approach their training role for what she refers to as “retail sales consultants,” or RCSs.

“The typical ways for sales reps to grow a territory are first, to open new accounts, which creates distribution issues; and second, pushing product on the floor,” Carothers said. “The smart way to increase a territory is the hard way—to develop a relationship with the retail salesperson who’s on the retail floor.”

Carothers pointed to the typical retail salesperson, who has a variety of vendors to show shoppers in their showroom.

“If I’m looking at seven manufacturers who basically do the same thing, whose catalogs will I take off the shelf?,” she said. “I’m going to take the one that’s easy to use, where I understand the price list. ... If the RSC is payed in commission, their time is their money. To the extent that manufacturers reps train (a retailer’s) people to use the available sales tools, they’ll see their orders increasing.”

Problem is, reps earn their living based on how much they sell, not how many seminars they teach.

“Reps need to understand how sales managers and salespeople are compensated within their retail accounts, but the way reps are compensated is not in alignment with supporting in-depth training of retail sales consultants,” Carothers pointed out.

A Changing Role

Karen Sawyer returned to work as a sales representative five years ago after taking a couple of years off when she had children. A lot had changed when she came back to the industry as a rep with upholstery vendor Vanguard.

“As reps, we used to just go into the store and take orders,” she said. “Now retailers expect much more of a business partnership with the rep, and the rep’s training role is an increasingly larger part of the job.”

The importance of that training role, Sawyer said, largely relates to high turnover among retail salespeople.

“We spend a lot more time doing nuts and bolts training, things like what’s involved in ‘eight-way, hand-tied,’” she said. “Vanguard is high-end upholstery, so we work with a lot of smaller high-end design firms. ... The range of experience is vast between newer designers coming in and those who are more seasoned.”

In addition to product education, Sawyer might cover topics such as white-glove delivery or how to handle freight damage with salespeople. Store visits take a lot more time than in the old days.

“You definitely plan your day around a retailer visit,” she said. “You just don’t see the buyer, but spend a lot of time with the salespeople, especially when there’s someone new.”

Carothers believes high retail turnover is a common source of resistance among reps to their training role.

“They’re saying that retail turnover is so high, why should we invest our time in retail (sales) training?” she said, noting that when a retail sales consultant leaves a store, they take a lot of product knowledge with them. “Some retailers won’t let reps work with their salespeople too much because they’re afraid a rep will tell competitors about their good salespeople. ... If you provide a wonderful working environment for your people and compensate them properly, they’re not going to want to leave you. Compensation is one half, and recognition is the other half. A lot of store owners don’t do that second part well.”

Setting Expectations

Retailers need to create clear expectations for the reps they deal with in order to define their training role, which in turn can contribute to a store’s overall operation.

“I run my inventory with them to see what’s selling and what isn’t,” Garden City’s Ray said. “You go through cycles depending on the time of year. Right now is strong for us in outdoor looks. I expect the rep to go through my list of inventory and make me aware if I’ve missed something so I’m not stuck with a lot of inventory.”

New goods and updated samples are a particular focus for Ray.

“Reps need to make sure their selling tools are current, and communication in that sense is as instant as an e-mail, and if you have too many mistakes in that regard, you realize your business is not important to them,” she said. “When we put something new on the floor, we bring our salesperson to the product and find out what they need to know. Those questions need to be listed” for presentation to the rep.

Sawyer at Vanguard likes to pay particular attention to her clients’ new personnel. She’ll keep new salespeople around after a meeting to go over topics she might have mentioned that are old hat for the veterans. Looking ahead, she believes technology will free up reps’ time to concentrate on their training role.

“Answers to questions we’d get on things like order status and stock status—all those little questions you used to spend time on the phone with—will be available online,” she said. “The online customer service aspect frees us up to do other things like training on product knowledge, delivery issues and pricing.”

As far as working with store personnel, a rep’s role boils down in a big way to accessibility.

“Reps need to be accessible, and while I know there are (retailers) that abuse their time, if we’re running a sale on their product, they need to be available,” Ray said. “Consumers nowadays, if you can’t give them an answer, they’ll go down the road to someone else.”

When it comes to training their customers’ sales personnel, Carothers emphasized manufacturers representatives have a vested interest in fulfilling that role as well as possible.

“The retail salesperson has more power than anyone imagines,” Carothers said. “A well-trained salesperson can sell more special orders, and while there are a lot of stores that want to just move inventory, a special order incurs less carrying cost. For those turn-oriented retailers, a well-trained salesperson also sells more out of inventory.”