Working with your overseas sales team

Colin Crabbe, the International Trade Manager with BGIT, is a highly experienced exporter with over two decades of first-hand familiarity in diverse markets in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East.

Drawing on his own experiences, Colin is a regular contributor to this website with practical articles to assist the inexperienced exporter.

In this article, he discusses ways of keeping a newly-appointed overseas sales agent motivated...

Motivation and assessment

"The relationship with your new agent is an important one - he or she is the person who’s actually doing the selling for you out in the field. That’s a key role, and you have to make sure they’re up to it and also put in place motivational programmes to keep them firmly on board.

You can assess them by going out into the field with them. What sort of contacts do they have – can they get you in to see the right people? Do customers recognise them as soon as they arrive – or have they put on a show especially for you ?

You need to know whether they really do have ready access to decision-makers to get your products into a new market – it won’t help you much if all they know are their customers’ back-office staff.

Assuming that you are satisfied that they are up to the job, I always found it a good long-term discipline to think about your agent’s salespeople as if they were your own employees. That is a good mindset for motivating them and recognising their worth.

The key principle for sales motivation techniques is “small but frequent”. Some of the simple things you can do include the following:

• Introduce a long-term reward/commission scheme
• Print special certificates in recognition of contract performance
• Send regular emails congratulating them on their efforts

You or your sales manager may even be able to engineer more face-to-face meetings than you might expect. You can achieve a lot even in a couple of hours of friendly discussion at the airport while you are en route to another destination.

Be imaginative

Even better, try to bring them back to base in Scotland for few days’ “induction training”. Often local salespeople in an overseas market don’t get much of a chance for international travel, and seeing Scotland for the first time can be such a memorable experience that they carry it with them for years. You may well find, as I have done, that the agent is willing to cover the cost of the air travel to Scotland as long as you arrange for the accommodation, which is quite a fair deal.

Alternatively, you might arrange for a number of sales people to meet for a few days in a relaxed neutral venue – when I worked in the Middle East we used to use Cyprus very successfully for this purpose.

Once you get to know the salesman, you may be able to work out a personalised incentive that’s really important to him. I remember I once had a Moslem salesman in Nigeria for whom we arranged a pilgrimage to the Haj in Jeddah, which is probably the biggest achievement in any Moslem’s life. He never forgot that trip, and was ours 110% from then on.

Once you can start quantifying how much business a salesperson is gaining for you, it is not unreasonable to consider making a formal recognition of his worth, perhaps even by paying for up to half of his overall operating costs. Clearly you must consult fully with his employer over this, but if he is really good and only costs you half of what employing your own full-time equivalent might cost, that could still be a very good deal.

Or you might arrange to upgrade their car. Salespeople the whole world over are all the same – they do like to be seen in a smart car!"