What To Do With Lazy Reps?
A while ago I wrote a blog asking “Who is the customer?” In our world of the Indirect Channel it works like this… I go find a customer. I give my customer pricing for 3 or 4 different Vendors. My customer decides who they want to buy and I hand off a signed contract to…
Who Exactly Is The Customer Here?
Have you ever sat back and wondered who exactly is the customer in the Vendor/Agent/Client model? Let’s break this down into what I think is very simple. We have an End Consumer, an Indirect Agent and a Vendor. The Agent’s world consists of bringing the Vendor and End-Consumer together. Therefore a lot of people like to think of…
Get to Know Telnes Broadband
Telnes is a company that has created quite a buzz lately. As you all know, I keep my ear to the ground and investigate any new vendor before I recommend them to a customer. I recently had some of my students at DePaul University dig into them for an extra credit project, and I was extremely…
Why Do I Have to Learn So Many Systems?
Why do I have to learn so many different systems? Something has definitely been eating at Gilbert Grape. Recently, I have noticed that most Vendors and Masters want me to learn their unique online ordering and quoting systems. When I request pricing, I get an email back instructing me to “go into x and put in the info, make…
Contracts 101
Contracts 101 – Do You Know What is in Your Vendor Contracts? Agents, are you noticing a rise in the one-sided nature of many Vendor contracts? I am constantly surprised when looking at new Vendors that we want to bring into our portfolio of offerings. I go through the process of working with an Agent…
Pick Up the Phone!
Why is so hard to pick up the phone? We have moved into a world where everyone wants to communicate via email and no one wants to pick up the phone. Maybe I am just “old school” but that does not seem to work most of the time. I recently went back and forth with…
