Opening a business agent is considered one of the business forms that bring relatively large profits as well as quite safe for business people. What are the things you need to keep in mind to be able to open an agency in the most effective way? Let's find out with Sapo right in the sharing below.
1 Research the market before opening a dealer
Market research not only helps you to assess the sales potential for the product you intend to trade, but also helps you understand the needs and concerns of the target customers. each brand.
This will help you easily choose the right brand as a dealer, ensuring your own consumption and benefits.
2 Remember the evaluation criteria for the supply of goods
Depending on whether you want to become a level 1 or level 2 agent, you need to have your own evaluation criteria to both ensure product quality and ensure benefits.
Usually, the selection of a unit to act as an agent will depend on many factors:
Reputation: In each category, the reputation of the brand is considered as one of the most important factors to ensure the trust of customers.
It is not too difficult for you to assess the reputation of each brand, which can be easily recognized during market research as well as tracking consumer behavior and habits.
And of course, a supplier with enough capacity and prestige will ensure the ability to maintain as well as the sustainability of the brand. This will help you minimize the risk of contracts, documents, costs as well as guaranteed supply.
Clarity on policies and papers: A well-known brand does not mean that you should completely trust their policies. Always be careful, black and white paper is the decisive factor to help you absolutely guarantee your rights. A reputable brand needs to be clear in legal issues and transparent in cooperation and signing information to come to a long-term relationship.
Product quality: If you are a tier 1 dealer, manufacturers will often have factory visits, which can help you get the best overview of the production process, or quality of the product.
Being an agent means you have the right to inspect and evaluate the product's quality
Product quality should also be assessed upon arrival to ensure that the product you receive is genuine and meets all the most important standards.
Product/service delivery performance: Deciding to be an agent alone is not enough, pay attention to the ability to provide goods to give the most overall assessment of the agent. There are several criteria to evaluate the performance of a unit's supply that you need to keep in mind:
- Delivery time: During the import batch, how long does the delivery agent have with you, is there a guarantee as agreed or does this affect your business or not.
- Delivery information: Is the goods delivered in accordance with the contract, each batch of imports? Is there a guarantee in terms of quality, type and quantity?
- Level of support: How can the agent guarantee the adaptability to your requirements or the ability to support products/services for your store?
- Product price: Price is obviously the most important factor to help you ensure the ability to pay as well as profit for the business of the store. Some dealers will list the selling price, so you only need to pay attention to the price as well as the import policy to evaluate to ensure conformity.
In addition, the price needs to be comparable to the prices of other suppliers, you can track the quotes of many suppliers to compare and make more suitable options.
In particular, changes in post-sale prices must be notified in advance as well as reasonably stable in terms of time. And the price on the order will not be allowed to differ too much from the invoice.
Along with that, one of the relatively sensitive issues that you need to pay attention to is the form of payment. In some cases, you will not be able to pay the supplier in full at once, this is the time when an agent allows multiple payments to bring certain advantages to your business.
3. Marketing the right way
Even if you are an agent of big brands, proper marketing is also the first important factor that you need to keep in mind to ensure your ability to reach customers as well as bring potential customers to your store.
By becoming an agent of a brand, especially an exclusive agent, you will be able to have the opportunity to receive advice and communication directly from the brand you are an agent for. This will help you save costs and communicate more effectively.
4. Optimizing the sales process
Optimizing the sales process can start from optimizing payments, managing goods as well as managing orders effectively. In fact, many stores have chosen to apply technology such as "sales management software" to store operations to save labor costs.
Optimizing the sales process eliminates risks, errors and makes selling easier
Because these management solutions not only help the payment process to be faster, more accurate and professional, but also bring efficiency in comprehensive inventory management.
As the most used sales management software today, Sapo POS is the solution to help store owners and employees optimize sales performance as well as minimize errors in their business processes.
Along with that, by applying special technologies, Sapo POS helps agents manage all goods, inventory and update each transaction. Especially, with an agent store, Sapo POS will help you evaluate the service as well as the product's consumption ability based on import - export features, debt or sales reports.
It can be said that, not only is a solution to help you sell quickly, accurately and easily, Sapo POS sales management software will help you manage the overall store and track and evaluate business performance. business in detail. You can start your experience today with a completely free 15-day trial of Sapo POS.
5. Make a business plan for each time
In fact, a business plan won't work all the time. This means, the planning, certain campaigns need to be based on the actual situation or time. For example, will you need a special campaign for March 8 or will you need an effective plan to liquidate a bunch of hard-to-sell inventory.
Read more: 9 steps for an excellent online business plan that surpasses all competitor
To do this, the evaluation and tracking of sales reports, inventory reports will be an important factor that you need to pay attention to to monitor the sales ability as well as the business situation of the store.
Sapo hopes that our above sharing can help you understand the business form of opening agents as well as things to remember when becoming an agent of a brand.
Read more: How to open a business agent?