Question

Topic: Strategy

Establish A Cooperative Sales Company - Strategy?

Posted by Anonymous on 10/2/2009 at 8:59 AM ET 125 Points
Is this a good idea -? Any experience on this? Please make comments.

1. Establish a cooperative sales company - owned by several, small-/mid sized companies (and myself as a salesperson)
2. All in same main-industry - but not directly competing. Travel, event, rental, conference, and more.
3. As an example: know a special event company, speciality on the sea, a small hotel chain with standard and historic hotels, a professional who arrange big conferences, a company renting out helicopter/flights, travel agents....and more.

Many of this companies does not have any active salesperson. They could do a lot more against customers. What if have a "travel desk" cooperative company, go out and introduce customer to this, who's behind it - and be the representative for all of this companies (single point of contact).

4. All parts do their regular business, but this "travel desk" have a fee or percentage of the sale.

Have anybody done this? Could this be done?

best regards
John S
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by michael on 10/2/2009 at 9:11 AM Accepted
    John,
    Great idea. Been doing it for years.

    Where are you located?

    Michael
  • Posted by Chris Blackman on 10/2/2009 at 10:17 AM Accepted
    John

    It's a good idea, but not a new one.

    Generally it's called partnering, or a partnership sales model. The idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

    The key is for the partners to be able to concede parts of a sale when that part makes no sense for the client. In a way, you have work doubly hard to put the client's interests before any of the partner's interests, and that's often tough, especially if one of the partners is especially hungry.

    Good luck.

    ChrisB
  • Posted by CarolBlaha on 10/2/2009 at 1:38 PM Accepted
    Partnering or Fusion Marketing

    I spent several weeks working on a biz plan for one in the home remodeling/maintenance biz. Home shows are big lead generators-- and the idea was to have all those kind of vendors under one roof (we allowed competitors-- but only 3 in each category). It was done in other states, but not in the area of this client. Front desk was staffed. It was a great plan and we had people interested in participating-- in fact we never got a "no". But the organizers never got the financing together. Mainly cause a couple partners only wanted to make 6 figures without actually working. (6 fig's without working-- that's a biz I want to get into!!)

    Same ole story-- great idea people but no execution!
  • Posted by CarolBlaha on 10/2/2009 at 1:52 PM Member
    BTW-- in the example I gave above. We didn't do it on % or commission. That is too hard to track. How will you know they will credit you with the sale?

    We were going to charge a monthly fee. You have to pay the front desk regardless of anyone's sales.
  • Posted by telemoxie on 10/2/2009 at 2:12 PM Accepted
    I spent many years doing outbound marketing and lead generation for multiple companies. My focus was lead generation and the cultivation of long-term prospects, not sales, and I am sure that focusing on sales will make you more money than the approach I took...

    ... but I would argue strongly against having these companies be owners of your company. I would expect that you will have much greater turnover than you expect among these "partners". Be careful that you spend your time selling, and not writing and rewriting partnership agreements. My personal approach was to contract with each client in small blocks of time, minimizing risk for each of us. If I were to do this again, I would probably work in larger blocks of time, e.g. quarterly or yearly, but I would definitely not negotiate or sign a partnership agreement.
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