Wholesale B2B and outdoor industry news, tips, and tricks.

Research: Long Live Reps

Written by Jon Faber | 3/24/20 1:00 PM

At Envoy B2B, we’re constantly striving to give you, well-researched info aimed at building a successful wholesale channel. For the past year, that’s mostly focused on specialty retail and its importance to this thriving industry, and #TheFundamentals of wholesale.

Those are pretty big topics, and we’ll be posting more on those in the future. However, specialty retail is not the only subject we care about within wholesale B2B, which is why we’re excited to highlight our research paper topic: the importance of reps and how they can best support retailers.

Download the Free Wholesale Sales Rep Report

We started by asking over a hundred retailers how important, on a scale of one to ten, reps are to the success with their stores. The average response was 8. Obviously, reps are still very important to the wholesale dynamic.

This intrigued us, so we followed up with those retailers and asked them in what areas they most need assistance from reps. Here are their responses, in order of most selected first. 

  1. Learning about product
  2. Getting brand and product content
  3. Assortment and merchandising recommendations
  4. Help with order status and delivery
  5. Order recommendations

You can simplify this to say: Retailers consider reps to be very important in the success of their stores and most need their help with product education and product recommendation. Which is a pretty strong endorsement and request.

We’re excited for you to read the whole paper and let us know what you think. Over the next few months we’ll be digging into the research more to talk about what it means, and how brands can apply what we’ve learned.

Download the Free Wholesale Sales Rep Report