Vincent Parker is the sales manager at Linkqage
Briefly describe your role at Linkqage:
I oversee the procurement and also the sales.
I have been doing it for 17 years and love it. Because I am responsible for sales, it means I know what the market trends are and what customers are looking for – and that helps to inform the procurement. I’m also in the right place when it comes to negotiating pricing for either buying or selling.
We pick up on market segments, and combine this with sales data and trends reports to make our buying and selling decisions.
At Linkqage, we have an amazing procurement team that manages the day-to-day stock, so Ivan [Blacher, CEO of Linkqage] can get involved where we are most needed.
Because I have been doing this job for 17 years, I have built great relationships with most of our suppliers. Quite often we have visibility into one another’s systems and can trade advice. It’s a very proactive environment.
We visit a lot of international trade shows, and make a point of meeting our suppliers face to face.
We also do factory visits, and actually spend quite a lot of time at the factories, especially those that manufacture our house brand Linkqnet.
Because of the time differences with our international vendors and manufacturers, we are effectively on a 24-hour shift and I often get messages through the night. We rely a lot on messaging apps to stay in constant contact with our suppliers.
What kind of stock-holding to you have?
It’s a dynamic space, and every day is a challenge – for a start, we get shipments coming in just about every day.
Overall, we carry more than 6 500 product lines, from about 44 brands. And we are looking to expand that – we want to sign up another six agencies in the next few months.
It’s important to ensure that the warehouses across the country are stocked with the right product mix. We have to look at market trends and what other companies are doing.
In addition, we work closely with our reseller partners to do forecasting.
We plan with our partners to understand what projects they are working on so we can plan with them to ensure delivery of the right stock at the right time.
Sometimes we even deliver directly to their customers to streamline the process.
Tell us about your sales training and communications
Upon arrival of a new product and immediately after unpacking, a photograph is taken and a brief video is recorded demonstrating its functionality, target application, and customer value proposition. These visuals are then shared on our internal sales WhatsApp channel.
We also do extensive training with the sales team, with weekly sales courses. We also have training with resellers, either in-person or virtually. We can help resellers in training their end user customers as well.
Our branch managers are also included on regular seminars and we work together on planning strategies, seeing customers, and understanding what products we need to bring in to fit their specific needs.
We are always thinking outside of the box. You have to, because things change so quickly in this industry. Just look at how quickly everyone has swung to AI.
So we think on our toes, ensuring that we are in constant contact with our sales team so we know what our resellers are asking for and what their customers are looking for.
Our communication extends to our resellers and we can help them with reaching out to their customers.