Several reasons may motivate you to bring on subagents. These include, but are not limited to:
- Increasing your sales force — as your base grows, more and more time is spent maintaining it, leaving you less time to prospect.
- Expanding your geographic coverage — if you want to grow beyond selling to businesses based in your local area, finding agents in complementary geographies can enable you to sell and, in some cases, service more territory.
- Attracting more customers — with more “feet on the street,” you can get in front of more prospects and sell more clients.
- Penetrating new account types — many subagents have expertise and contacts in verticals or business segments (large enterprise, for example) in which your staff is not well-versed. One of my subagents, for example, has experience with not-for-profit organizations. Not only has he brought not-for-profits to the table, but now these clients and his experience are part of my company’s capabilities.
- Helping fulfill monetary contractual commitments to carriers — this in turn can help you to get more attractive rates from suppliers.
- Becoming more customer-service-oriented — if you are differentiating your service on its support, that requires more staff, which in turn requires more and larger sales to subsidize.
- Growing your revenue base — ultimately, the overriding goal is to grow your revenue and profit by making more sales and retaining more customers.
Supporting Subagents. Before taking this leap, you need to do a quick inventory of your current situation to determine what you have to offer subagents and whether you can support them effectively.
• Can you afford to pass on a fair percentage of your commissions as incentive? I have found that some of the best subagents are those that I may not pay top commissions. Instead they are well-connected business owners that may not have expertise in telecom and are willing to be paid less for my company’s assistance in closing the deal.
• Does your organization have the support mechanisms in place to service subagents? Are you using a CRM package to manage order processing, trouble tickets and quote inquires? Is your commission system automated? While you can manage subagents without automation, it saves a lot of time and money over the long run. Before I automated my back office, simply running commissions took hours for my staff to complete. Now, it happens automatically.
