Author: Dennise Austin, Business Development Manager for XLam NZ Ltd, NAWIC Member and chair of the NZIOB central region committee.
A warm hello! This is an insight into our industry from a sales representative point-of-view. Not just mine, but from many sales professionals. Our roles encompass many things, whether it’s assisting you by ensuring the correct products/systems are specified, organizing project specific pricing, facilitating the logistics of getting the right product on site at the right time, ensuring the right applicators are installing the products specified, providing sustainability credentials or going to bat for you with council when you try some innovative design ideas. As product representatives we have a plethora of knowledge in the building industry. We are the solution providers throughout the lifecycle of your project, a hidden resource, a power of knowledge, and a trusted industry professional. We are here for you.
Our roles have many fancy titles and slight twists on service offerings including - Regional Manager, Business Development Manager, Sales Rep, Account Manager, Territory Manager, Business Partner, Technical Sales and Architectural Consultant, the list goes on. We are here to help you and your team to select the best fit solutions for your projects, to achieve the best outcome in terms of product selection, technical advice, on budget and we try to ensure the procurement and the supply of the product specified arrives on site and is installed correctly as per the technical literature.
Having been a product specification representative for many years it’s fair to say we don’t have an organisation or institution like NZIOB, NZIA, ADNZ, NZIQS and the many other industry organisations that plumbers, electricians etc have. We sit on the peripheral and align ourselves with the organisations that we have common interest with.
In the companies we work for, we are sponsors of events, educationalists, client/customer relationship builders, one of the solution providers in the industry - alongside our technical teams (and sometimes we are the technical team).
Building relationships and networking is what we are about, not only can we resolve your queries, but we also have strong networks of people in the building industry, if we don’t know, we can find out and put you in contact with the right people.
We are more than that annoying rep that just sent an email or called and left a message, we do more than update your folder, we are driven to exceed our customers’ expectations, and have the KPI’s to prove it! We are here to collaborate with you for the betterment of the building industry. We are here for you.
If you can think of a product or supplier, that you would like to get to know better or understand what they can do for you, reach out, we will buy you a coffee and see what we can do to help you, we are here for you.
