SE PA if it matters. Is it normal to have saddle reps just appear without an appointment? I didn’t talk to him but another border did. It’s the barn manager’s day off. I don’t care, and no one is touchy about visitors or anything, but it seemed odd enough I thought I should ask around. We did have a random weird kid show up on foot with a knife one day so I may be more suspicious than normal lol.
No experience with random reps but I absolutely need to know more about knife child 
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I’ve had saddle reps stop by our barn at the shows without an appointment. But more on this random creeper.
Bizarre
It seems weird, because it is likely a waste of their time.
Larger barns have a schedule and having a random sales rep show up does not fit into that schedule so the rep is not likely to get the full attention of anyone. Smaller barns they might simply run into what this one did, the person they need to talk to is not there.
Just plain weird.
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I don’t know if it’s normal, but the Devoucoux rep showed up at the barn I board at without an appointment the other day. She left a flier and card. The trainer is sponsored by Albion, so I don’t think anyone even has a Devoucoux there. Maybe saddles aren’t moving well now?
I’ve never had that happen, but they are commision-based and that is a lesser-known brand, so they are probably looking to aggressively market their saddles.
My goodness would I hate to walk into a farm uninvited to just “see what happens”, I know feed reps will stop by and drop off samples, but to me that is vastly different than a saddle rep just stopping by unannounced.
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Ex-rep Here.
Cold Calls are encouraged among all saddle companies. Especially if the barn isn’t sponsored by any company or is sponsored by a competitor. We had to log 10 a day, which was quite hard in my territory to do 10 per day, 6-7 days a week.
I HATED cold calls. I felt so awkward, but most barns were very nice about it and you got more appointments than you think by doing them. Usually it was someone that had a saddle they want to check the fit on, or they’ve always wanted to try saddles (and since trials are free and you’re there, why not!). Some also had a saddle they need a repair on. I even got a few trainer trials out of them.
Luckily for me, most barns in TX had gates. So I did most of my cold calling via phone or even FB from the comforts of home because I refused to try and break codes. 
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I haven’t ever had Forestier show up, but a long time ago I was a working student for a big BNT and we’d get plenty of cold-calling reps a few times a week; and that was more than 15 years ago. Towards the end of my stint there I started to view them very uncharitably – as WS, we were all on tight time frames to get every little chore done, and they would waltz in and expect to command our total attention. They would sometimes set us back by hours. On general principle alone after that experience, I wouldn’t give a rep that showed up unexpectedly an ounce of my attention, besides “Kindly GTFO.”
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Wow. How is one supposed to find 60 new barns week after week after week? That seems like a crazy number.
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Thank you all I feel better that at least the place wasn’t being cased by a chatty French guy.
So the kid (really a teenager) with a knife walked up the drive one day from who knows where. The barn isn’t near anywhere you’d walk from unless you were an immediate neighbor, so that alone was odd. And although polite he was also a little strange in manner, maybe a bit autistic or something like that. Nothing wrong with that just made him harder to read. The other boarder there and I both just thought he was maybe lost, but it was just creepy enough not to leave him alone while she went to find the barn manager. BM was found, called her husband who came up, and the kid was trying to talk him into giving him a ride in between wandering around. Somewhere in the wandering around someone noticed he was playing with a largish folding knife and stabbing the fence posts with it so at that point the whole thing was weird enough the BM called the police.
Police arrive and talked the kid into getting into the car without incident, thankfully, and told us they were happy we called. But never heard anything after that about who he was or why the police already seemed to know about him.
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I was in TX, so my managers thought since there were so many horses & properties with horses - it was doable. We tried to explaining that just because a lot of people had horses in my area, that didn’t mean that A. They rode any English discipline and B. They had ever seen a saddle period. That always fell on deaf ears, unfortunately.
This is only one of many many reasons why there is so much turnover in the industry.
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We did. Paul randomly showed up at our barn one day. Now our pro is sponsored and we’ve had like half a dozen people convert over. It helps he’s actually super knowledgeable and our area reps for other brands are not.
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Kind of like a door to door salesman in days past? We had unannounced people show up at our urban BB all the time during business hours. Never seemed odd.
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It makes sense to me, even if it is to do a quick introduction and drop of a business card or 2, and some literature.
Showing up unannounced to make a contact and drop off cards is a little different than showing up unannounced and expecting to demo some saddles!
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With all the saddle fitting threads and the agony described by a significant number of posters( myself included) in finding a saddle , there may be more interested parties than you would think.
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I despise when reps show up unless they are toting a free 50 lb bag of grain.
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How did you like being a saddle rep in TX? I have an opportunity to do it but am afraid, I might not be able to meet my financial goals and won’t be able to show as much. Would you mind sharing more about your experience? Thank you
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