Europe characteristics

Europe can define greatly different territories. You first need to consider carefully where in Europe you would like to sell your products. You may want to sell to all European countries, or you may want to sell your products to the European Union (now 25 countries representing almost 500 million people). You may want to restrict your sales to Western Europe or Eastern Europe, or any subset of countries. Note that RepGlobal lets you search by countries or by region.

Europe's main characteristic is its diversity. Europe is a young entity. Each country has its own culture and above all its own language. There are roughly as many languages as countries.

One or several sales agents?

How do you choose a sales agent in Europe? The first question you need to consider is whether you need one sales agent or several ones. Most of the time you will need several ones, mainly because of language differences.

One of the advantages of local sales agent is to rely on a person who communicates more efficiently with customers. But if you hire a German sales agent, how will he communicate with a Spanish company? In English of course. So having a unique sales agent for all of Europe does not make sense from a language point of view.

You can minimize the numbers of sales agents you need by grouping countries that have a common language. French is spoken as the native language in France, part of Belgium, part of Switzerland, and Luxembourg. German is spoken in Germany, Austria, and part of Switzerland. Note that German and Russian are widely spoken as a second language in Eastern Europe.

How many sales agents you need depends on your products. If you sales generic products, or if you sell products taylored to each language, you will need one sales agent per language. You may even need several sales agents per country if you sell a high volume of products.

On the other hand, you may use only one or a few sales agents if you sell very specialized products and if there is no local competition. In that case you can also group territories by proximity or characteristics. Common groupings include:
    - One sales agent for Sweden, Norway and Finland
    - One sales agent for Spain and Portugal
    - One sales agent for France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland
    - One sales agent for Germany, Austria and Switzerland
In certain cases you may even choose to have only one or two sales agents for all of Western Europe.