independent affiliate

Being an Independent Affiliate Opens Doors That Others Close

As a promotional products distributor, the last thing you need getting in the way of your success is a long list of requirements preventing you from working how you work best. Commonly the result of affiliating with many promotional products organizations (and often sold to you as benefits), these requirements might include using that organization’s branding, having to use certain vendors, following certain marketing and sales processes, restrictions on certain customers or industries, having to report into a home office, and even having to relinquish some control of ownership in your business. 

It’s important to understand that these requirements will only hold you back. 

Imposing these requirements on you stifles your ability to focus on building relationships, selling more products, and growing your business. These are the reasons why you got into this business, and they’re what you love to do. And nothing should hold you back from doing them more and reaping the rewards. 

The iPROMOTEu Independent Affiliate Model

This has been a challenge in the industry for decades: distributors and salespeople forced to work in ways that aren’t conducive to their sales process, industry and product specialties, and overall long-term strategy. In 1999, our President and CEO Ross Silverstein recognized this industry-wide bottleneck and set out to fix it by founding iPROMOTEu. 

Whereas other promotional products organizations seek to grow by placing distributors and salespeople under their corporate umbrella (in terms of name, branding, and processes), we chose to go another route. We believe that independence in the promotional products space leads to success. And as one of the fastest-growing distributor organizations across the U.S. and Canada, we’ve proven that to be true. 

There are several key reasons behind our emphasis on independence that we’d like to explore with you.

1. Your Business is Yours Alone

If you’ve already established a promotional products business and have been focused on building it for some time, it doesn’t make sense to reduce, limit, change, or otherwise do anything to modify the business itself. Doing so puts a strain on you and your team, necessitates changes that carry unnecessary costs, and ultimately gets in the way of you selling. And that’s the reason why you would affiliate with a larger organization in the first place: to get access to better tools and support so you can grow even more. You would not affiliate with a company just to have to change everything you’ve worked so hard to build. 

The iPROMOTEu Difference: Our independent Affiliates don’t have to sign over their businesses, change their company name, or upend their processes to get access to our services and support. We are purely focused on helping them grow their businesses — no strings attached.

2. You Should Be Empowered, Not Restricted

Just as you wouldn’t affiliate with a new organization to have your business changed, you wouldn’t affiliate with someone who put restrictions on what you can do and who you can sell to. Non-competes, buyout agreements, and other restrictive provisions limit your ability to grow your business. And often, these restrictions come with the added frustration of your distributor organization’s internal sales reps crossing over into your relationships — causing frustration, loss of business, and straining your affiliation relationship. 

The iPROMOTEu Difference: As a network of independent distributors, we believe that you should be free to sell to who you want, however you want. There are no restrictive agreements between us and our independent Affiliates. Each one is free to disaffiliate after six months if they so choose. We also don’t have any internal sales reps that would jeopardize your relationships.

3. Your Customers Remain Yours

You’ve already invested time and energy in building your existing relationships. Why risk those relationships by losing your ownership of them? At some distributor organizations, you may be required to sign over your customers, effectively making them the legal property of that company (and no longer yours). This greatly hampers those relationships and your ability to continue supporting them.

The iPROMOTEu Difference: Your customers remain yours from the moment you become an independent Affiliate with us to the day you retire or move on. We are here to empower you, help you grow your existing relationships, and help you identify even more opportunities. While we offer marketing tools and systems that allow you to put your customer data to greater use, we won’t ever bar you from it.

4. You Keep Your Identity

On top of your business as a legal entity and your internal practices, you also have something incredibly valuable to your team and customers: your branding. Your customers are already familiar with it and its meaning, so why change it? Doing so only results in customer confusion, added costs for updating signage and materials, and time spent on managing the details when you could be focused on selling instead. Your brand is who you are, not who another company thinks or requires you to be.

The iPROMOTEu Difference: We believe that your brand is who you are. You should not be forced into another organization’s branding when it might not reflect the specific, unique ways you add value to relationships. Thus, iPROMOTEu does not require our independent Affiliates to rebrand to match our organization. They retain their company names, branding, and other identity elements. We are simply here to support their success.

5. Work How You Want to Work

There are many reasons to affiliate with a promotional products organization, but they all ultimately translate into something more meaningful and personal: how you want to work and live your life. While you may love your career, there’s more to you than just that. You have family, friends, hobbies, and passions outside of work. You deserve to spend time with the people you love, reap the financial rewards of your hard work, take vacations, and do the things you love to do. You should not be required to work unreasonable hours — whether as a shift or as a necessity of meeting unrealistic goals.

The iPROMOTEu Difference: Our support goes beyond helping our Affiliates with their day-to-day operations. We want those who join us to fall in love with careers all over again, and that can only be accomplished by having a healthy work-life balance. As an independent Affiliate, our support makes it possible for Affiliates to spend less time on burdensome administrative tasks and more time doing the things they love. Vacations, family time, and personal time are important, and all that we do is designed to help you enjoy them more often.

This is Just the Beginning

For 20 years, we have put our Affiliates first in all that we do and offer. That’s because your success is our success. We’re people, too, and we believe that together, we can achieve greater success. The reasons outlined above as to why independence is so valuable for promotional products distributors and salespeople are just a sampling of the many benefits of the iPROMOTEu independent Affiliate model. 

If you’re a distributor looking to grow your business or a salesperson looking to branch out on your own, iPROMOTEu provides the support you need to do so while enjoying complete independence, more time, and greater financial success.

Reach out to learn how our independent approach can help you take your business to the next level.