If asked you to think about successful companies that used local sales representatives to sell their products, who would come to mind?  Think about it for a minute.  Who do we know in the business sector that uses a distributed sales approach to get their products out to people on a personal and local basis?

If Avon was one of the companies that came to mind, you'd be right.

Avon has built a company and a brand by employing local representatives in just about every community in the United States to put a familiar face and name on their product.  It's one thing to own a brand that everyone recognizes.  It's quite another to provide your customers with a local representative that's always available and always close by.  That's what Avon has done.  And it's worked very well for them.

But when they decided to make it easier for those local reps to have an online presence, they were faced with a challenge:  how to create something that retains the personal touch and lets those reps track how well their online products are doing?

In an exclusive interview with Pattiann McAdams, Avon's Executive Director of Ecommerce, MarketingSherpa shows you just how they did it.  Since it's an exclusive I won't republish the details here.  But I highly recommend reading the interview.  It talks about what the company created, how they made it trackable, and some of the features used to create the new service.

You don't have to employ over half a million representatives to put something like this to use for your company, either.  Think about affiliate programs or reselling programs.  What could you create, even from scratch, to allow passionate customers the ability to put their love of your product to use in a way that benefits everyone?