Why Reps Aren’t Reaching Their Full Potential and How to Fix It, with Bryan Shirley

[00:00:03] All right, everybody. Well, welcome back to the Flowing Sales Podcast. We are honored to have Brian Shirley on our show today. Brian has been consulting in this space for 14 years. He previously was a president of MANA. And so we're excited to hear all of your insights.

[00:00:19] Sure. First of all, thanks a lot for having me and I'm excited to be here to share some insights. Always love talking about the relationship between manufacturers and manufacturers reps. I was a manufacturers rep in the Philadelphia area, seven state territory, 25 employees.

[00:00:34] And we are in the electronics business and did that for about 20 years. And as you mentioned, I was the president CEO of MANA for about five years.

[00:00:40] And since then, pretty much just been doing this kind of stuff, presentations, consulting, coaching and things like that to reps and to manufacturers. So I teach a couple of courses for the MRF programs. One's the CPMR. It's a certification for reps and I also teach one for manufacturers.

[00:00:57] It used to be called manufacturers best practices. We've rebranded and re-kicked it. It's now called gross sales with reps more appropriately because that's what we're trying to do. When you're talking to rep firms and manufacturers,

[00:01:09] what do you feel like is maybe the biggest pain point or the biggest opportunity that they have when you're consulting with folks? Where would you start? Great question, Curtis, because I think that the thing that lacks the most, it might be one of the easiest things to fix.

[00:01:24] And that's what I call developing a true strategic partnership. And I think we have that with people. I'm not so sure that the relationship between manufacturers and manufacturers reps is a true strategic partnership. A lot of heavy words all there, true and strategic.

[00:01:40] And of course, the word partnership itself indicates that we're all in this together. When I ask that question to audiences of manufacturers, I say, how many of your reps companies you have 12, 15, 17 rep companies across the country?

[00:01:52] What percent of them do you think you have a true strategic partnership with? Manufacturer will tell me probably about half of them we have. I ask manufacturers rep and I say, if you have 10 lines on your line card,

[00:02:04] how many of your lines do you have a true strategic partnership with? And they go 10 percent. I say so one out of 10 of the manufacturers you think you have a strategic partnership or the manufacturers views that five out of 10, they have that.

[00:02:18] So you got to go back to what the heck is a strategic partnership or a true strategic partnership. And to me, it's all about the communication expectations, trust and respect.

[00:02:29] There's a lot of golden rule all wrapped around how we communicate and how we do business with other people. But I think it's one of the hardest things that to have that wide open communication kind of thing. So we can really talk candidly.

[00:02:42] I say manufacturers reps have a lot of arrow wounds or bullet wounds back here. Right. And not that the reps are skeptical, but they are. So it's hard. I'm not blaming the manufacturers for not having this strategic partnership. If anything, I think the better communicator,

[00:02:59] the person that could get the true strategic partnership relationship improved is the manufacturers rep. And a hard thing to do to get that real consistent candid kind of communication where you don't have to waste a lot of time worrying about what you're going to say.

[00:03:12] You can just say it. Where we go, I mean, 10 percent, even 50 percent seems fairly low to where it should be. So where are we going wrong? What do we need to do better? We touched earlier about rep councils.

[00:03:23] I mean, that is certainly something that I heavily promote and I convince manufacturers one, it's not expensive. I know you did one on this. I'm not going to repeat all the nuts and bolts of who to have unless you want to dive into that.

[00:03:35] But four or five reps, four or five people from the manufacturers. But the real thing there is to have candor. Manufacturers, what they sometimes don't realize, here's the best market intelligence you can get for cheap.

[00:03:47] And I'd say a rep council and I sat on a lot of them, maybe five thousand. You can do it for five thousand dollars. You invite four people in, that's four airfares. You pay for the airfare one night at the courtyard Marriott.

[00:03:58] Go out into a ball game one night. But wrap all that up and you spend five grand, even you spend ten grand. You got an amazing amount of market intelligence from the people.

[00:04:07] And one of my most important things or suggestions or requirements is that you do a survey on the front end of the rep council. So it's a big step that a lot of manufacturers or reps forget to do.

[00:04:19] We survey everyone on the street, not just the rep firm owners, all of the salespeople. And we ask about that manufacturer and we say, how are they on price delivery, quality and service in the industry? How are they on new product introduction?

[00:04:31] How are they? How are they? How are they? You get all this really good candid information from the people that are on the street, anonymous confidential information that then creates a really great agenda.

[00:04:42] And I was like, what are we going to talk about? Well, we're going to talk about new products and things like that. But it's not a sales meeting.

[00:04:48] But you want to focus in the manufacturer in particular wants to focus in and hone in on what the people from the street are saying. Good or bad about what they should emphasize more or what they need to fix. So you get all that survey information.

[00:05:00] And again, that creates a really solid agenda for manufacturers and the reps to talk about. You weed out all the crazy crap. Like somebody said, Johnny and customer service didn't call me back.

[00:05:11] You get rid of those outliers, but you look at the threads or the themes that are consistent through that. Like your pricing on this XYZ product is consistently high. We haven't been able to sell it because your pricing is consistently high. Something to try to tackle.

[00:05:25] So that's kind of my view on rep councils is one of the best ways to increase and build trust because the manufacturer saying I want to listen.

[00:05:33] And sometimes it's hard. You have to evoke information out of manufacturers reps are so tactical and so sales oriented and so reactive. I say they're the most reactive animals in the business jungle.

[00:05:43] So sometimes manufacturers reps forget to say to a manufacturer, hey, have you ever thought about trying this? Or one of our other manufacturers has this spiff or this program. Have you ever thought about trying that?

[00:05:59] And sometimes reps are skeptical to say it to a manufacturer because they don't want to say you're doing something wrong or one of my other minds is better than you. But again, it's back to that having the capability to speak candidly and openly and have the communication stream.

[00:06:13] The only other couple of things with rep councils is that the sole intent is to grow sales. So the four or five things that are the to do's when you leave the rep council should be focused on sales focus,

[00:06:24] customer centric sales focused things that are grow the business. And Mr. Manufacturer, Mrs. Manufacturer, you get to choose. These are the four or five things you don't say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You can say yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do that tomorrow.

[00:06:37] And these other two, we need to research more. We need more information. That fifth one I'm not so sure about. But you have to be careful that the rep council is one, manufacturers are willing to hear where their warts are.

[00:06:50] Two, it's a safe environment for reps to speak up. I've been in ones where we say, oh, yeah, everything's safe and all that kind of stuff.

[00:06:57] And it wasn't quite so a couple of months later when one of the reps said something and then he was no longer the rep after 22 years.

[00:07:04] True example. And then one of the most important things that we always fail on sometimes or not always we fail sometimes is the re-communication. So you got all this input from all these people on the street, as I mentioned. You need to tell them something afterwards. Right.

[00:07:18] Whenever you do surveys, feedback is the most critical thing. So per our rep council, we're going to be working on these four things and da da da da da. Thanks for your inputs. Let us know if you have any other ideas.

[00:07:29] And then quarterly, I'd say rep council should meet via Zoom or however. What do you see as far as I guess a survival rate of sorts of rep councils?

[00:07:40] I've been doing this 27 years and it seems like there's been a couple that have withstood the test of time where and I think those are the most valued from the manufacturer as well as the rep.

[00:07:53] It's truly that safe space. It's where we can have the candid conversations, but it's something that happens every year at least. Right. We've had some where we come in and they've hired a consultant and we'll do three or four years in a row.

[00:08:04] And then it's just like goes to the wayside. What do you see as far as the success rate of truly making this a part of the program between a manufacturer and a rep agency? That's so spot on, Craig, because that is so much what I hear.

[00:08:19] I get in front of an audience and I say, how many of you have a rep council and you get that sheepishly hand that goes up like this? Like, you know, and then I kind of drilled down.

[00:08:29] Oh, yeah. When's the last time you had it? Well, yeah, it wasn't just those numbers three or four years ago. We had it and we haven't had it since.

[00:08:37] Certainly can blame COVID, but during COVID, I said now rep council will cost you nothing because you can do it over Zoom or MS Teams. So during COVID was an excuse to not continue it.

[00:08:48] The consistency of it, the making sure you do have once time a year again, I think that's that's a great frequency. And again, it's not expensive to do, but right. Lots of them just fall off as a lot of strategic planning that we all do ourselves.

[00:09:03] I would say the goal setting is easy. Goal getting is hard, and we normally fall off right around the accountability or consequence part of keeping track of how we're doing.

[00:09:15] But again, you don't come out of that kind of meeting or in my opinion, any meeting with 18 to do items or 18 goals or certainly not 18 strategic objectives.

[00:09:24] Three, four things that we're going to do that have impact and impact the reps in a positive way to help them go sell more stuff. And again, manufacturers, you need to ask your reps more. What are we doing right? And what are we not doing right?

[00:09:37] I have a little exercise called start, stop, continue. What should we start doing? Which we stop doing, which we continue doing. It's that two way communication.

[00:09:44] You know, we have to be able to be open, but couldn't agree more that a lot of them fall off or reps tell me I used to sit on three annually and now I sit on one.

[00:09:54] But the one just to your point, the one that sticks, the one that you sat on that was consistent over the years valuable, right? Oh yeah. Without question.

[00:10:02] Tell us a little more about the start, stop, continue just to give us a little more because peel that onion bag a little bit. Sure. Sure.

[00:10:10] You know, a lot of people do SWOT analysis, which I think is a great thing, but what do we need to look at? There's a good little book called a change is easy. You go first.

[00:10:21] That our perception of it or our fear of it sometimes, but we look at really things that what are time wasters? What's taking up time that we don't even. We're not even sure it's valuable. Is it valuable to our customers?

[00:10:34] Essentially manufacturers and reps, you know, what should we stop doing? What is silly in some cases that I run into a situation and facilitating something like that. I get to kind of say that if someone else doesn't say it, it's really silly that you do that.

[00:10:47] Why do you do that? You know, you have to examine time is the currency of manufacturers reps. That's pretty much all they have. And it's who's time and what direction they're going.

[00:10:56] I say replica wakes up every day and has an option to go do that, go do that or go do that. And it's their choice of what they're going to go do and where they're going to spend their time.

[00:11:04] So the start stop continue is again, kind of an open kimono. Let's see what what's good. Let's do more of that. And that's the continue. Let's what what program should we start and what program should we stop doing? Time wasters and income generating activities.

[00:11:21] So one start or continue income generating activities, stop the time wasters. I like that. Now that's it. That just kind of makes it even much more simple to go over as just, you know, versus the Swatz.

[00:11:33] We do a lot of those, but I like that start stop continue. I mean, you kind of boil it down to those three things. And it makes you go do something. Sometimes we do SWOT analysis and we go, oh, OK, right.

[00:11:44] We go, OK, now we know our strengths. Now we know our weaknesses. Opportunities is hopefully where you hone in and go down that road. But lots of times we do SWOT and then put it aside. Lots of times we do strategic planning and put it aside.

[00:11:56] They call it like I've done it since the early 80s. And I'd say it can't be credenza where you used to make up nice little binders and all that kind of stuff. January, February, March, we're just cooking along. And I said there's an effect.

[00:12:09] And I made this up. I call it the Jason effect because January, February, March, we just did it in December. Our strategic plan. We're all set. We're hustling. We're going March, April. Yeah, we're still going. We're looking at it.

[00:12:20] And then we hit Jason, July, August, September, October, November. And we don't do crap towards our strategic plan because we put it on the credenza. It's back there. That's why we we drill down and say, I don't recommend a lot of books.

[00:12:35] There's one called The Four Disciplines of Execution. It's by one of Stephen Covey's son, Sean Covey and a guy named Chesney. And it talks about the four disciplines and that in a Covey way, it's all he simplifies it down.

[00:12:49] You can't have 12 as we talk about how the number of goals, wildly important goals. Focus on the wildly important goals. And it can't be 12 of them. There's not all wildly important, probably three or four wildly important goals. Focus on the lead measure, not the lag measure.

[00:13:05] I always talk about, you know, that 30 pounds I'm going to lose down the road. Don't focus on that. Focus on how many times I worked out. What was my caloric intake and et cetera, you know, weekly kind of things. Develop a cadence of accountability.

[00:13:19] That's what I said, where we all fall down every week. If I had to call both of you and tell you how much I weighed, that accountability would probably make me better than in my own mind writing it down on a piece of paper. It's a good book.

[00:13:30] And again, I think we all have great aspirations when we set goals, but you have to tick away at all of the measures that get us there. And I'm not big on reporting and too many metrics. And we've all heard KPI, in my opinion, too many times.

[00:13:45] If they're important KPIs that all make sense, the flow to the mission, the flow to selling more stuff, I'm good. But sometimes you kind of get mired in a process and to me it's don't get mired too much in that when your job's to go sell stuff.

[00:13:57] You mentioned earlier on this idea of boosting sales. What other concepts, you know, we talked about rep councils, we talked about start, stop, continue. What other core concepts do you think are really important that you go over with folks to help boost their sales?

[00:14:12] To me, Curtis, it's a heavy focus on new business opportunities. Right? We've got big accounts and when manufacturers come by default, you want to go to those accounts just to say thank you and all that. But if there's not new opportunities, a new design, something new

[00:14:25] going on at that customer, it's good to see that customer. But I call this is just going to drag us to the same old accounts. Let's go where the new business opportunities are. And my job as the sales leader of my rep company was to always first

[00:14:37] thing in the morning, I'd sort by all of the new business opportunities. I had 17 outside sales engineers and I would sort by highest dollar, their confidence factor, highest confidence factor and closest to closing. So if I saw something as a $400,000 NBO, and it said there's a 90%

[00:14:54] confidence factor and they said it was going to close in July, I'd look at the action items and say, how can I help that salesperson get this thing done? So focus on new business opportunities again, become sales focused, customer centric.

[00:15:06] And I really love, and this is not a ding for those who don't, but I love working with manufacturers where the leadership has come out of a sales role. There's all different, I think there's about four different types of companies.

[00:15:17] Some are product innovators, great at product and all that kind of stuff. Some are like logistic people, great at think Amazon. And then there's some companies that are very sales focused, customer centric. And I love working with leaders again, who, you know, the old adage

[00:15:30] of they carried a bag, um, somehow they get our world or the world better. Other tips again, just focusing on new business opportunities, knocking down the obstacles so that we can get the order, making sure that we're competitive, making sure that our delivery quality and all

[00:15:45] those other things are in line. Lots of times it's just knock down obstacles and get out of the way. Let the leave the selling to us. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the new, new business is an interesting one, right?

[00:15:56] Like you said, it's easier to go to a current account. It's harder to go and prospect and find new folks. Let's say a rep firm is trying to prospect into a new industry or something. What's your best advice for tackling that side, right?

[00:16:09] How do we get new business? What's the best approach? Great subject because it is so difficult for salespeople to get appointments. And our goal in our old world was four calls a day, four days a week at 16 face-to-face appointments, which is hard to do, especially in today's

[00:16:28] world, I got a valid as of all the functions that got messed up by COVID. I think sales took the biggest hit. And here's why production people had to put extra gloves on mask, whatever they had to do. They're still going there.

[00:16:42] They're producing whatever accounting people, they might work from home now, but their job function didn't really change salespeople. Our customer said, don't come see us. Salespeople didn't know what to do that turned us on our head.

[00:16:56] We want to go out, press the flesh, meet people a lot about it. Right? Our old thing was it, we functioned by having interaction face-to-face human interaction with people. That's what gets salespeople going. And the wall kind of went up.

[00:17:10] So since then I'm really big on face-to-face selling, you know, getting in front of this is face to face. Probably not as good as I've, if I was sitting in between the two of you and the three of us were there, but it's still a face-to-face

[00:17:22] activity, so did a lot of coaching and consulting on helping people use. Zoom to go to, but now I'm back to the get out there. And it makes it again, the harder part of that is customers aren't necessarily at their place of business anymore.

[00:17:38] They went to a work from home situation and I say, then you got to be creative. How about if I bring a sandwich to your house? How about if I meet you at Starbucks, how about whatever it is to get

[00:17:48] face-to-face with new business opportunities in particular just, and it's difficult, so we say three things you need to be persistent, need to be persistent, but polite and professional. And so we go through kind of a regimen of email call voicemail.

[00:18:03] And that old thing about seven, it takes seven touches to get something, get an appointment, get an order, whatever it is. That's no longer in play. It's about 22 touches required sometimes for me to even get a reaction from you.

[00:18:17] One little tip and not to dive into the weeds too much. We encourage people again, phone call email, wait a little bit, phone call email. Then we also will send a calendar invite. And if I send a calendar invite to you, Curtis for Tuesday at 1030,

[00:18:31] just send the calendar invite. If you say decline, I'm not going to come. If you say accept, I'm going to come with a smile on my face. But if you don't do either of those, essentially you don't do anything, it's still on your calendar.

[00:18:43] It appears on your calendar, but it's grayed out, but it appears Brian Shirley 1030 Tuesday. And I've done this with even newer salespeople where it's harder for them. And with 75% success on walking in that day at 1030 and you saying, okay, yeah, that's right. He's on my calendar.

[00:19:01] I'll give him a half an hour. Yeah. And it's gotta be again, back to the, you can't call up after the fourth time and say, listen, I left you four voicemails. How come you didn't call me back? All right. Let's tell salespeople.

[00:19:11] It's not the job of the customer to call you. It's your job to follow through. And sometimes people misconstrue follow up with follow through. I left him three voicemails and he didn't call me back. My salespeople you see her this noise, meaning again, it's not

[00:19:28] their job to call you back. You better keep going. Um, so polite assistant and professional to get appointments that makes sense. And then once you get the appointment, there's so much sales training out there.

[00:19:41] God bless all of the sales trainers, but some of them are still stuck in the let's go sell features, benefits and advantages. Yikes. Like I come in and I go see this. It, it's got a little red ball on it. It has some switches on it.

[00:19:53] It's really cool. It's really nice. And the temperature ratings are this and that. Did I ever ask you if you needed it? Right. So to me, it's a needs assessment and needs analysis before anything. The old, you got one mouth, two ears, ask, ask, ask, listen, listen,

[00:20:08] listen problem first product last helping us in the new selling. We've taught people and I've done it myself. I've helped my customers find products that I don't even represent. A friend of mine in the Southeast, Roger would tell you if my

[00:20:22] customers want coat hangers, I'm going to go get a coat hanger line. But it goes back to the listening piece. It's like, all right, well, what do you truly need? What's your problem? Hey, what keeps you up at night?

[00:20:31] I mean, those things are, those are important to ask. I mean, a lot of times we just come in and we just start spewing information versus asking them questions. Look, I know I've done that.

[00:20:40] And, but at the end of the day, the most successful sales calls that I think any of us have had have been the listening piece, and then you're able to try to work with them to problem solve.

[00:20:49] You also mentioned it was interesting about like, you know, COVID and, and how that impacted sales, the whole profession, and you have to be much more intentional now, like you're saying, you got to meet them on their terms

[00:21:01] at their house, at their Starbucks, versus if you could go into the old days, if you went into a utility, you might go to the engineering floor. And then you could, you know, you'd see so-and-so just walk

[00:21:11] into the bathroom or walk in and you could see a lot of people at one time. That's no longer the case. You have to be so much more intentional and it's made it more difficult, but

[00:21:20] it's also kind of got us all out of our comfort zone and we've got to come up with creative ways to tackle the problem, but you hit the nail on the head there. We've all had to change how we do things in the past several years. Right.

[00:21:32] And your word about intentional, intentional to support the needs and wants of our customer. It goes back to what you said, listening to what they need, what keeps them up at night, that kind of stuff. It's the making them look better, making them save time or money, make

[00:21:46] them look better in their job and help them save time and money. And the people that have done really well are the most creative salespeople coming out the other end of what we are, the COVID selling era, if you will.

[00:21:57] And I think a lot of people, not a lot, some people still lean on, on that ever since COVID, you know, the great, what they call it, the great resignation. I know a lot of reps like, oh, no longer in business. I just decided that was enough.

[00:22:10] What else do you see? We talk about COVID, how that kind of changed things, especially for reps, right in the sales space, five years down the road. What other changes are coming that rep firms maybe should be thinking about before it's too late or they can prepare, right?

[00:22:24] Is there, are there trends in the industry that you see that we should be thinking about? Your world, AI, right? I see that and I don't think reps have their hands wrapped around that. For me as a content developer, in some cases it's helpful, but

[00:22:38] AI is going to play, I'd say on a rep standpoint, preparation, research and preparation of an account, preparation and research of a new business opportunity is critical. And then it's about being prepared and then about what we talked about following through.

[00:22:52] So it's that persistence again, in a professional way of following things all the way through showing up, you know, the 80% of it is showing up by strongly adhere to getting in front of customer. I say to reps, your customers are your friends where they should be.

[00:23:10] Your manufacturers are your friends and manufacturers, your reps should be your friends. You're developing relationships all the time. And I still have friends from 20 years ago that were my customer or my manufacturer and they're still friends.

[00:23:25] So if you go in with that of trying to be that problem solver, rather than just thinking of the customer as a dollar sign of how you're going to help later on, we're going to sort it

[00:23:35] out how many times you can actually go visit that person based upon the opportunity and we're going to qualify all of our opportunities by dollars. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but you need to be out there, get face to face more.

[00:23:48] At its core, their relationship. And then that's not going to change, right? That's a sort of fundamental thing about humans and sales that that's never going to go away. So I know we're coming up on time. I just want to give you the opportunity.

[00:24:01] If people want to reach out and work with you, what's the best way to reach out and then we can, we can leave it there. Sure. So my website's pretty simple. It's bryansherley.com. Brian is with a Y and my emails easily again, bryansherley.com.

[00:24:16] So they can go there, cell phone, pick up the phone and call me. One thing in my notes that didn't want to miss is what I tell manufacturers if they want to become a true strategic partner with the

[00:24:27] reps or if they want to become the emotional favorite of the rep. You don't have to be number one, two or three in the line card. That's a myth. You can become the emotional favorite of a rep by using an acronym that I

[00:24:38] called reefer, and this has nothing to do with the fact that I lived in Southern California for 14 years. It's an abbreviated spelling. It's R E F R. I say R is for responsiveness. Reps, all they do, I don't care what products you don't really

[00:24:54] sell products, you move information. You go to the customer and you get this, you need a sample. You go to the manufacturer, get that information. You get the sample. You come back to the customer, say here's the sample. The customer says, give me pricing.

[00:25:05] You go back to the manufacturer, you say, give me their conduit of information. So the information has to be fast and reliable. So number one thing, Mr. manufacturer, you need to be responsive. Number two is the E you need to be easy to deal with.

[00:25:19] I don't know how many reps have heard up our policies won't allow that. Like that's not the way operate in. And we're not asking for something crazy, but if you're asking for something realistic, you have to be easy to deal with, not fill out

[00:25:29] this form to get that or all that kind of stuff. And sometimes it's necessary, but in general, you need to be easy and say yes to rep requests. So REF, F word, I always ask the audience, do you know the F word? It takes a minute, right?

[00:25:44] But then somebody finally said fun. And that is the F word. Reps are crazy animals. They like to have fun. Manufacturers have fun with them. And the last R, REF, R is what reps do all the time, create and sustain relationships. Mr. Mrs.

[00:26:01] Manufacturer, you need to also create and sustain relationships with your reps to make them true strategic partners that everybody can sell more. I like that. Yeah. I've never heard that put it that way. That I like that. It usually gets people's attention when I started that way. Yeah.

[00:26:17] Reaper will never leave. Yeah. Every time I hear the Reaper somewhere, I'm going to be like, I'm gonna think of Brian Shirley here. Well, thank you, Brian for, uh, for joining us. We really appreciate your time to take a half an hour and chat with us about,

[00:26:30] about all these topics that I think are really, really important. So we appreciate it. That is fun. Again, anybody wants to reach out to me? Uh, 30 minute zoom call. It's no charge. I'll give you all of my wisdom.

[00:26:41] And I can probably do all that in three minutes, but I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm doing a 30 minute zoom with folks.