Our blog has a mix of articles written by our founder, Walter McDonald, and by other industry experts, business owners, and equipment dealer team members. Learn about everything from marketing ideas to tips for successful branch operations to how to retain customers—and everything in between!
When it comes to identifying leads, turning those leads into customers, and retaining those customers over the long term, there are certain strategies or tools that every dealer needs to put in place. Those strategies are identifying website visitors, regularly sending out emails, and conducting customer satisfaction surveys to understand where you need to improve… Continue reading Three Essential Tools for Dealers
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1. Review the fill rate for each whole goods model your dealership sells. Where are your support problems? As part of its product development process, each manufacturer creates a “mortality list” of parts that could fail during the early life of the product. By reviewing this list of recommended spares, you can stock more of… Continue reading How to Improve Off-Shelf Parts Fill Rate
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Text Highlights: Appendix Why I wrote this book The focus of this work is to examine the Best Industry Practices in Successful Key Account Management in today’s machinery dealership. Many dealer principals tell me they don’t feel as though their organization pays nearly enough attention to this challenge. Every dealership has a small number of… Continue reading Successful Key Account Management – Machinery Dealer Manager’s Handbook
Read MoreSelf-Study Program Readings and exercises in this self-study course are found in this e-Book plus the three volume PARTS MANAGEMENT TOOL KIT. This e-Book provides an extensive set of Management Development readings and exercises utilized in my more than 2,600 Dealer Management training workshops around the world. The majority of these programs have focused on… Continue reading Parts Management “Tool Kit”
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By Walter J. McDonald
A dealer VP of Aftermarket recently purchased my new 600-page Service Management—Machinery Dealer Manager’s Handbook. In my discussion with him, he stated his three priority issues were: Here are the recommendations I provided on how to address his three priority topics. Step one is to identify quantitative performance benchmarks of highly successful dealers for each of… Continue reading Utilizing Service Management Tools
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By Walter J. McDonald
It wasn’t long ago: Parts “managers” were super parts countermen, chasing down parts, answering phones, scrambling to help impatient technicians, servicing even more impatient counter customers, and trying to respond to their manager who wanted to know why the UPS shipments from last week had not been put away yet. Fortunately, today most dealer owners… Continue reading Parts Management: Accelerating Performance
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By Walter J. McDonald
Participation Rate is the key to market share growth for a machinery dealer. However, there are two machinery distributor deal participation rates. And, the opportunity for one occurs much more frequently than the other. Each Participation Rate reflects purchase activity between an end user and the machinery dealership. The Primary Participation Rate is the customer’s… Continue reading Participation Rates and Market Share
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By Walter J. McDonald
The most successful machinery dealership rental operations are under the close control of a Rental Bus Driver. This Revenue Center Manager is responsible for the overall profitable operations of the department. To be successful, your rental business management process must include qualitative insights together with quantitative performance metrics that are reviewed weekly. Today’s rental market… Continue reading Building a Wildly Successful Machinery Rental Business
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By Debbie Frakes
People visit your website, because they are interested in your products and services. But if you don’t know who they are and when they visit, you may never have the opportunity to welcome them as a customer. More than 90% to 95% of purchasers (customers and prospects) will investigate a dealer by visiting their website… Continue reading Who’s visiting your website?
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