How many sales reps are too many?

[drk]

Lux has instituted a new policy whereby each rep only has two lines. I think the reps are salary, so I would imagine they would happy with this.

However it has added a few new reps to my rep-ertoire (hahahaha). I'm at fifteen.

If you see reps quarterly (I don't) that would be a crazy number of appointments!


How many do you think is optimal? I think about a dirty dozen.

[Sledzinator]

We have 9 technically but I hardly count our ray-ban rep. He hasn't step foot into our office in over a year and last time he came it was unannounced. It's actually pretty irritating because we display about 75 frames and never hear from him. He is honestly our worst rep by far but we sell so much ray-ban that we can't drop the brand.

[Kwill212]

How many is too many. 1.

It boggles my mind that these companies are still paying and sending outside sales reps all over the place. I have a few reps I like, but I rarely see them, and they almost never come into my store. I don't need them to and I don't have the time. I might call them a few times a year to find a DQ part or frame but that's about it. Nothing that an inside sales person couldn't do. I don't get it. Don't even get me started on contact lens reps...

[KrystleClear]

For the drug reps, we started a little binder with their business cards are what rep handles what. It was getting confusing when we had multiple Bausch & Lomb reps and we would ask one for certain drop samples and they would look at us funny because they were the B&L surgical rep. I'm happy with as many reps as necessary as long as they actually provide us with useful information about their products. Some frame reps do and some just dump out all their trays and say pick some.

[Optical Roy]

Some frame reps do and some just dump out all their trays and say pick some.

I had 1 try that and I said I would be glad to pick some, just not any of this crap!

[mervinek]

Back in the day I used to do report cards for my reps and frame lines. It had everything on it from the very simple...return phone calls and shows up on time... to the quality of frames and warranties and company policies. (graded on a 1-5 scale) We dropped several reps based on their report card. It was always done before VE East. It's prob stuff you would do anyway but we just had it on paper and gave each rep a copy. It allowed them to see where they needed improvement etc. I found it helpful. We graded as a team. You might have one rep that was horrible but 1 staff member liked them. Or maybe you had one line that kept breaking and 1 person just happened to be the optician that got all the breakages and the other one didn't get any. Took opinion out of the picture.