It's been a wild ride for independent manufacturers' reps the last few years. A crippling decline of historic proportions in the all-important nonresidential construction market forced them to find other sales opportunities. Tablet computers and cloud computing now give them access to critical sales information when they are out in the field. New manufacturers in the lighting and energy markets are after them to rep their lines.

Electrical Wholesaling, January 2012

Throw in evergreen industry challenges like finding more selling time to market new products, distributor mergers and succession planning and you can see why it's been an interesting few years for the independent manufacturers' reps that an estimated 80 percent of electrical manufacturers use in whole or in part to sell their electrical products. This era of change has coincided with Ken Hooper's first three years as president of the National Electrical Manufacturers Representatives Association (NEMRA), Portsmouth, N.H., after he took over for Hank Bergson, who retired from the post after serving the organization for 22 years. It's presented some interesting new challenges for Hooper and his new team in Portsmouth, as well as Jim Bannon, NEMRA's director of information technologies, and his IRIS IT team in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Hooper had worked with independent manufacturers' reps for more than 30 years in executive posts for Ferraz Shawmut, Legrand and GE, so there haven't been too many surprises in how reps operate. But during a recent interview in NEMRA's offices in downtown Portsmouth, a postcard-pretty New England city on the New Hampshire coast, Hooper said he's been pleasantly surprised with how willing reps and manufacturers have been to donate their time to the NEMRA executive board and NEMRA Manufacturers Group (NMG) in this era of doing more with less.

Kirsty Stebbins, NEMRA's manager of marketing and member services, didn't work directly with reps during her five years with Siemens in inside sales support, but that experience helped her appreciate the importance of getting field salespeople timely, accurate and valuable product information for their sales calls.

This is a primary focus of RepFiles, a new mobile-based content management system for electrical product information such as price sheets, marketing collateral, videos and installation guides that NEMRA supports. (See “Point of Contact” on page 19.) With RepFiles, manufacturers can keep this information updated and available for use out on the cloud, and reps and other electrical salespeople can download the information they need to their tablet computers, so they don't need an internet connection while on a sales call — a huge deal when you consider the sometimes tenuous nature of dependable internet connections when you are on a sales call at a construction site or in a factory.

This year's NEMRA conference in San Diego will help reps make sense of this new and more mobile world. Hooper and Stebbins say pre-conference registration for the seminars on RepFiles for NEMRA by John Hoelz, its creator and principal of J.F. Nolan & Associates, New Berlin, Wis., has been phenomenal. To help reps keep in touch with their businesses back home and to access the cloud-based NEMRA strategic planning software in their meetings with manufacturers, NEMRA has invested in broad WiFi coverage at the conference. The association also invited a web-site design company to be part of the conference's showcase of services to help reps redesign their web-sites.

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