By Walter J. McDonald
What works and what doesn’t will depend a lot on your specific products and services, your business community, your competition, and your skills in how you promote your equipment business.
Remember, the least expensive technique to generate good prospects is word of mouth. Foster good relationships with all people—employees, customers and friends—by treating them with respect, honesty and compassion. Become active in your community. Expand your network and gain personal satisfaction by participating in worthy causes. Your connections with other people will have a ripple effect.
Always remember to keep your current equipment customers happy. It’s much less expensive to keep the ones you have than to develop new ones.
- Invest in high-quality, colorful, unique business cards. Have some printed for every employee and encourage them to pass them out to everyone they meet. This will help build important relationships between your employees and customers and spread the name of your dealership throughout the community. Business cards are actually a “mini billboard” that may be the first direct contact a prospect has with your dealership.
- Use the back of the sales rep’s business card to get referrals. Print the following message on several business cards for each equipment sales rep: “Please take care of __________ the same way you helped me. Tom Smith.” Tom Smith is your current customer. Smith passes your card to a prospect and writes the prospect’s name in the blank. For every prospect that brings in the referral card and purchases a new unit, Tom Smith receives a premium (free hat, dinner for two, free steam clean and lubrication, etc.). Each sales rep should have five or more customers working on passing out referral cards to your dealership.
- Create a good, ten-second introduction to describe yourself and your dealership. “Hello, I’m Randy Williams with Tri-City Equipment. We specialize in helping customers increase productivity, reduce cost and improve revenue.” Teach this introduction to each employee. Practice it so you can deliver it smoothly when you or your employees need to introduce yourself.
- Network. One of the best sources of ideas and contacts is to network at trade shows, chamber of commerce meetings, trade association meetings, and community functions. When you become inactive, people think you probably have retired or sold the business. Remember, people like to do business with people they know. Both Parts and Service Managers should be active in these groups.
- Develop a clean, crisp distinctive logo for your business. Use it on your business cards, letterhead, invoices, and integrate it throughout your signs, vehicles, and printed materials. A good logo can enhance your business image, increase your name recognition, and create an identity.
- Participate in customer and industry trade association meetings. One consistent trait of successful dealers is that they regularly attend trade shows and meetings related to their customer trade groups and their industry. Put your networking skills to work and you’ll make valuable contacts while learning new skills. Use trade group forums to make on “how to” presentations to reduce maintenance costs, improve operator safety, reduce equipment theft, improve job productivity. Never use this forum to “sell” just educate and inform your potential customers.
- Start a “customer suggestion of the month” program. Offer a $25.00 gift certificate to customers whose suggestion is chosen as the best. Give him recognition in your newsletter. Three good things happen with this promotion:
- You reward present customers (a way of saying thanks).
- You get good suggestions on how to better serve your customers.
- You learn what your customers are thinking.
- Stage a fun event, operator training, maintenance clinic or open house at least twice a year at your dealership. Special events generate customer traffic and excitement both for customers as well as your employees. Get all employees to work together to paint and fix-up the facility as a team-building exercise.
- Start a club. The club will be much more successful if you make sure it’s fun, involve the members from its inception, offer adequate rewards for membership (discounts, preferred customer mailings), keep in close contact with members and solicit their input.
- Write articles for your customers’ trade association publications. Your manufacturer will help you with suggested copy. Editors are always looking for well-written, timely materials. Select articles that your prospective customers read. To build your credibility and name recognition, post reprints of the article in your dealership and distribute them to selected customers and prospects.
- Develop and maintain a clean, up-to-date mailing list of your customers and prospects. Make sure everyone is on your manufacturer’s publications list. Organize your list by business segment and do targeted promotions by industry.
- Steal and adapt good ideas from others. Review out-of-town newspapers and Yellow Pages for ideas. Look closely at direct mail pieces you receive. Any ideas there? Visit competitive dealerships and note what they’re doing and the things they are advertising. Watch successful businesses to see what tactics they are using to promote their business.
- Always say thank-you either orally or in person. Showing your appreciation to current customers will help make them future customers. In an impersonal world, a handwritten thank-you card makes a great impression on a customer.
- Use “messages on hold” to carry your advertising message. These can be great to advertise your special services or the expertise of your employees.
- Exhibit at trade shows and community fairs. You’re looking for exposure, not necessarily sales. Don’t forget the drawing for gift certificates to your dealership.
- Conduct a Sales Blitz. Organize everyone in the dealership into teams of 2 to make a large number of account visits. Distribute rental cards, offer prizes to teams who make most account contacts. Use a list of never-before accounts.
- Send special-event notes or cards congratulating customers for a promotion, wedding, graduation or other special event. Ask your employees to keep their ears tuned to conversations and assign an employee to scan the newspaper daily for news about your customers which might merit a congratulatory note.
- Host “how-to” workshops. Such strategies are widely used by equipment dealers. Dealers say they don’t expect a lot of money when they do customer workshops, but they try to invite as many as possible from the target industry, build store traffic and enhance the respect customers have for the dealership.
- Seek out informal partnerships with noncompeting suppliers and arrange to work together in mutually beneficial ways. A successful dealers said that one of the smartest things he did consistently is to form partnerships with other businesses where they can benefit each other.
- Use as much co-op advertising money as you can. Take advantage of the matching funds that manufacturers offer to help you advertise their products. By some estimates, as much as 50% of co-op funds remain unused.
- Develop an attractive Yellow Pages ad. Don’t just accept the format recommended by the phone company. Go to the library and study creative ads in out-of-town phone books. Look at the ads of your competitors and make sure yours is different. Prospects and new residents turn to the Yellow Pages first to discover specific information—so give it to them. List what you offer—products, attachments, accessories, parts, service, emergency service, rentals, used equipment. Grab their attention with a strong headline, and use graphics or a photograph.
- Invest in remnant space advertisements. This is advertising space in regional editions of national publications “left over” after major advertisers bought space. Magazines are put together in four-page units and sometimes not enough ads will be sold to fill the unit, so remnant space is sold very cheaply to fill the section. Call the advertising department of the magazine directly, well in advance of the publication date.
- Find a way to connect your equipment or maintenance services with a famous person or local personality. Keep tabs on interesting or famous people who will be visiting your town or find someone who’s doing something that’s bound to get media attention. Invite them to come to your dealership and, with their permission, notify the press and your customers’ favorite radio station.
- Offer free services to add value to the products you sell. This one element can be the deciding factor in whether a customer decides to buy from you or your competition. Could be a free jacket in the fall, a free ice cooler in summer.
- Make a long-lasting impression with specialty advertising (hats, pens, calendars, mugs, notepads). Two big advantages of using this medium: your name stays in front of the customer for a long time; and chosen well, your advertising can generate a good response because everyone loves a useful, attractive, free gift.
- Reward every visitor to your dealership. If a customer or prospect takes the time to visit your dealership, show your appreciation with a small gift. One dealer provided a different supply of $2-$3.00 gifts every five or six weeks for employees to give to each customer with their thanks: caps, windshield squeegees, insulated foam holders for soda cans, bottle of windshield wash. This new dealer quickly drew new customers into his business. Try this for two months and test the idea.
- Refresh every visitor to your dealership. Have a popcorn machine running in the parts/service area. Provide waiting customers a token for free soda or coffee. Make your dealership a comfortable, enjoyable place to visit. Give waiting service customers a coupon for a free lunch at the local diner.
- Build the prestige of ownership. Take a 35mm color photo at time of equipment delivery of the customer with your equipment logo prominently shown in the picture. Hand carry the 8×10 framed color print to the customer, thanking him for his business (and asking for a referral).
- Start a frequent buyer program. This type of program offers incentives for customers to continue to buy from you and rewards them for doing so. The “prize” might be a discount or a “free” lubrication or a “free” rental day.
- Set up equipment window merchandising displays in vacant buildings. Many cities have vacant buildings in need of tenants, or at lest decoration. By displaying your equipment and product support services in these facilities you promote your business much like a billboard. The display must reflect positively on your business, so make sure your display is attractive with a nice background. Include a big sign with your business name, address and phone number. What other off-site high traffic areas offer an opportunity for a product display?
- Print up pads of post-it notes with “industrial strength” adhesive strip. Contractors can stick the note sheets on lumber, glass, etc. with your company name and logo prominently printed on the bottom.
- Create a killer sales presentation. One dealer created a funny, entertaining slide show that was so well done, he’s had many requests to present the program to service clubs. The audiences enjoyed the entertainment and it brought great exposure to the company—all at no cost.
- Create a float for your local parade. Parades can be great ways to get exposure for your business. Your image is a stake, so make the float unique and memorable.
- Draw customers and prospects to the dealership with a fun contest. An operator rodeo is a popular event. Considering the attention it attracts and the store traffic it generates, these contests often help spur big monthly sales figures.
- Promote a “yard sale.” Get all the old parts inventory and obsolete stock out on tables with prices. Offer refreshments, promote in your monthly customer mailer.
- Send postcards. When customers have not been to the dealership in a while, send them a post card. An attractive, handwritten card addressed directly to the customer simply says, “We haven’t seen you in a while. Let us know if you need anything.” This keeps the name of the dealership in the mind of the customer. And, when customers call or come in, they say, “Thanks for the note.”
- Send messages to your customers via email, but get their permission first. This is a great way to advertise parts and service specials, new units in the rental fleet, new attachments. Make sure you target the email to the type of businesses that would naturally be interested in the product, not just a wholesale mass distribution. Once or twice a year, a dealer hires a temp who calls every potential customer in the market area, updates the customer profile and email addresses and asks for permission to send promotions. About 97% of those called express interest in receiving the promotions, and almost all become customers.
- Provide customers tip sheets. These can range from daily maintenance requirements to how to best utilize an attachment. Today’s equipment customers are hungry for ways to improve productivity and reduce cost. Give it to them.
- Volunteer for high-visibility assignments such as making presentations, chairing committees, or organizing events in your customer trade associations. Being visible in your business community through such activities will heighten your visibility in the marketplace. Everyone likes to do business with people they know and respect.
- Make full use of a toll-free hot line or support line. Building long-term customer relationships is what modern-day marketing is all about. Do your customers know you’ll always be available to answer their questions about the equipment and attachments they buy from you? It’s a great selling point and a good way to turn them into lifetime accounts.
- Sponsor or co-sponsor a sports team. Have your name printed—possibly with your slogan—on the back of the shirts. Regardless whose team it is, you’ll earn appreciation and recognition.
- Create a dealer newsletter with customer applications and installation reports. Highlight successful customer applications and give credit to customers for creative ways to complete jobs, improve productivity and work methods. Be sure your photography is crisp, clear. Use black and white film in a 35 mm camera. Take lots of photographs so you will be sure to have two or three good ones for reproduction. As the journalism department at the local college to help you. Students often take up such a project for class credit at little or not cost to you.
- Conduct a Bar-B-Q at a remote job site. With the contractor’s permission, bring a portable grille and serve hamburgers or chicken and sodas to all the operators. Provide hats with your company name. Have a sign on the side of your van with your company name, inviting all operators in the area to attend.
- Print and widely distribute a “Quick Lube” promo card. This colorful, post-card size promo item gives your dealership’s name, address and phone. The offer is for a Quick Lube (all Models) $24.95: change engine oil, change engine oil filter, 10 point inspection, grease machine, no appointment necessary.
- Be the first. We remember the first like Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Be the first to offer oil analysis to skid steer loader customers; the first to offer one-year parts and labor warranty on any part you sell and install; the first to offer free back-up rental if the unit goes down for more than “x” hours; the first to offer a planned maintenance program; the first to offer a full maintenance lease on new equipment; the first to offer free pick-up and delivery on major overhauls; the first to offer field breakdown response in under two hours if the customer is under a contract maintenance agreement; the first to guarantee parts availability on your primary lines within 24 hours or it’s free.
Remember, there are hundreds of ways to promote and to build prospect-generating programs. Also, avoid offering equipment discounts. Market research indicates that discounting prices creates a false customer base and can permanently erode your profit margin. Your discounted new equipment price becomes the actual price in the minds of customers. A recent study by SMU in Dallas analyzed the purchases of three large groups of customers: one group received a discount coupon, one group received a promotional item of equal value and the control group received nothing. The group receiving the promotional products purchased more frequently and in larger volume than the groups who received discount coupons or nothing.
Use Rent-to-Sell as your primary tool to provide lower priced like new equipment. Don’t discount new units. Just offer the customer two-to-six-month-old units with low hours at less than “list” price. Good promoting and good prospecting!
If you would like to discuss any aspect of this article or to learn more about our machinery dealer development resources and capabilities, I’d welcomed hearing from you.
Walt McDonald Walt@McDonaldGroupInc.com www.McDonaldGroupInc.com