We were delighted to host our first ever Redipor prepared media distributors meeting at the Cherwell Laboratories headquarters in Bicester UK on 6th February 2018. In recent years, Cherwell Laboratories has signed with a number of distributors throughout Europe to sell Redipor® prepared media. We felt this was an excellent opportunity to bring them all together to inform them of our future plans and to give them the chance to all speak to each other about their experiences selling Redipor® media.
Our Irish sales representative, Ritchie Mooney, had warned me that part of hosting a distributors meeting would be playing the role of taxi driver. I found myself driving both to Luton Airport and a couple of Heathrow Terminals to pick our distributors up. We picked up representatives from Italy, Poland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain and Northern Ireland. If you are wondering, we have a long standing relationship with Davidson and Hardy to distribute Redipor® media in Northern Ireland, going back to the days when we were a very small company.
We took them all out for a meal the evening before the meeting which was an excellent ice breaker. We started bright and early the following day with our MD, Andy Whittard, giving the representatives a brief history of the company (I love all the old photos, especially of the original premises - an old greenhouse not far from where we are now based) and our future targets and plans. It is hoped we will expand into more territories soon so watch this space!
Following a site tour, which everyone found very interesting as they all got to view the production process from start to finish, Sales Manager, Andrew Barrow, gave a presentation about the range of customers we have, what we sell to them and also our strategy in targeting customers. I learned a great deal, especially the different approaches taken both by our distributors, and also by larger and smaller companies. This is bearing in mind a number of our competitors are large multi-national organisations.
Either side of lunch I gave a couple of presentations, the first was a summary of the updates in the annex 1 revision out for consultation. This was followed by a presentation about the features and benefits of Redipor® media over our competition. The meeting ended with a round table discussion, the attendees had their opportunity to talk about their experiences selling Redipor® media, obstacles and suggested improvements to both the product and service.
We felt this meeting was a great success, the attendees took away a great deal of information to hopefully help aid them in increasing Redipor® media sales, to better understand the products they are selling and how best to target potential customers. Hopefully to be repeated in a couple of years’ time!
