May 19, 2014

Without angering my clients who pay me for this valuable advice, I’ll offer this one valuable tip, plus a few example questions to get your juices flowing.

Valuable tip: Make sure the sales rep you are interviewing is grilling YOU. He/she should be asking you the tough questions a retail buyer will be asking them. Without doing so, they will not be prepared to sell your line. If they sound too eager without doing their due diligence, I suggest you end the conversation and move on.

Other questions to ask sales reps:
• What can you expect in terms of purchase orders and by when?
• What types of tools do their retailers expect you to provide? It varies and your sales reps will know best what works in their retail stores.
• Will their retailers provide POS data to you?