Our objective is to increase your product sales across New Zealand, your brand awareness, your marketing and therefore increase your profitability. By having Earthstar as a sales partner, we allow you to focus on the supply side, innovation of your product portfolio and thus raise the profile of your entire business in this tight competitive market.
Our aim is to ensure that we focus on the sales burden, so that you can:
In many cases, suppliers like yourself hire a merchandiser to visit retailers and keep the face to face relationship with the retailers. This often represents a cost of $20-$25 per hour plus travel expenses to the supplier. The reality is that, it is an unbalanced risk model, with risk being weighed on the supplier, as there is little incentive, focus or skill for the merchandiser to nurture the retailer relationship.
Hiring a semi-experienced sales manager brings an internal head count which impacts your bottom line by $98,550 per year (industry average cost of employing sales manager, as published by New Zealand Institute of Sales, 2015). In addition, this means having to work with HR issues and paying costs while sales may be low.
Photo: Andre Kong
You may consider doing it yourself. This is certainly an option, as you have knowledge of your products. However, knowledge of market place is also key and experience has shown that business who handle sales internally, tend to work all hours “in the business”, losing sight of other opportunities which would have been captured if they “worked on the business”.
The foundation to good partnership is the “addition” of experienced and reliable capability to your business. Hiring other independent commission based consultants, with less experience, may appear cost attractive, however your aim should be to “buy-in” the much-needed capability to grow your sales. We continue to hear stories that solo agents are not wholly reliable, sustainable or a long-term solution.
