Guiding Principles

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SUCCESSFULLY COMPETE IN TODAY’S MACHINERY RETAIL BUSINESS? HERE ARE THE AREAS THAT ARE ESSENTIAL TO YOUR SUCCESS.

Data Analytics for Sales and Marketing Strategy
The typical machinery dealer has only 10% of customer emails and less than 75% of customer phone numbers available for sales, service and marketing programs. And, overall, 40% of the customer information is wrong. Territory deal visibility is often less than 25%. To be successful, dealer customer information must be current, including emails and telephone numbers for all customer/prospect contacts.

Strategy: Conduct Consistent Email Promotions

• For dealers offering specials in their email campaigns, an up-to-date email address to reach all their customers is critical. If their database includes emails for only 50% of their customers, the remaining 50% of their customers will not be aware of the special (Lost Sales). Customers who receive your emails purchase two to three times more often than the customers without email addresses in the Dealer’s database. This impact on your business of recording emails for your customers demonstrates the value of keeping your customers’ information and email addresses current
• Customer satisfaction scores have a correlation of over 90% with customer retention. And, the customer retention rate increases 20% – 30% when you have a consistent method in place to measure customer satisfaction scores, which reports problems to management, so they can be corrected quickly.
• Omni-Channel marketing is becoming more important across a variety of industries. Equipment dealers need to start putting systems in place to encourage online purchases, as parts purchases online are becoming more prevalent, and even larger purchases like automobiles are starting to occur.

Strategy: Capture “Active Interest” Leads

• More than 90% of purchasers, both customers and prospects, will investigate a potential dealer’s website and product information before contacting them. This is the exact time to capture their interest and significantly increase dealer awareness and identify current specials.
• The dealer’s online presence—Google 5 star rating, plus website and product information— will determine if someone is going to contact you.
• 75% of website visitors who say they intend to purchase will actually purchase new or used equipment in the next 12 months. A website popup asking “Can I help you?” increases formfills by 6 to 10 times for potential buyers that are actively looking.
• The transaction close rate on completed form fills is about 50%.
• Marketing Automation is one way to remind customers and prospects to purchase. If they open the initial email, a second email can be automatically sent, which can trigger a series of emails. This approach is effective particularly to remind customers and prospects of special promotions.

Strategy: Build Parts and Service Business

• Dealer sales reps can become 3 to 4 times more effective when the dealership distributes emails and captures website activity for “active interest” leads.
• Dealer sales transactions and revenues are 8 to 10 times more from customers who purchase service and parts more than 6 times throughout the year. At this point these customers consider the dealer their preferred vendor.
• 90% of dealer machinery unit sales are to existing parts and service customers who consider the dealer handling these transactions to be their preferred vendor.
• Once the dealer has gathered customer emails and begins to distribute email promotions, dealers formerly at a sales growth rate of 5% -10% per year can now achieve a 20% – 40% sales growth rate.

Thus, parts and service is revealed as the fundamental driver of the machinery business

Strategy: Conduct Monthly Customer Satisfaction Surveys

• Conducting customer satisfaction surveys every month, using invoices from the previous month, improves customer retention rate by 30%. Why? Problems are identified and solved quickly.
• As a result, the growth rate in customers is 49% higher in terms of numbers and 123% higher in terms of revenue for equipment dealers that conduct customer satisfaction surveys routinely.

NOTE: This is a brief abstract from Achieving Dealer Mangement Excellence by Walter McDonald

Source: Data derived from over a 10 year period of tracking dealer customer transactions (parts, service, rentals, sales) from the experience of over 100 machinery dealers managing more than 500,000 customer relationships. Courtesy of Winsby, Inc., www.winsbyinc.com. For more information on Winsby’s programs that help dealers retain customers, increase purchases for existing customers, and attract new customers, contact Debbie Frakes at dfrakes@winsbyinc.com

Marketing Automation and Omni-Channel Marketing

What is the relevance of these two processes for dealers?

Marketing Automation includes the information technologies and software platforms designed to assist machinery dealers effectively market and sell products and services on multiple channels and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing Automation includes email marketing, social media scheduling, managing the sales pipeline, running and monitoring special advertising campaigns, managing leads and more. Marketing Automation enables dealers to work more efficiently by automating routine tasks, improving support staff productivity.

Marketing Automation software automates the processes that track and influence the prospective buyer and guides them through the sales funnel. Marketing Automation tools include capturing leads from all dealer marketing channels, including website visitors, telephone inquiries and other marketing channels, such as Social Media and LinkedIn. Leads need to be cultivated at the right time with the right content. Conversations need to be tracked at each contact point: phone calls, business computer text messaging, emails, social medial, web chat, and more. It is also important to understand the intent of a lead and make sure the lead gets the appropriate targeted response by tracking website activity and segmenting contacts by their area of interest. Marketing Automation can also identify opportunities to upsell and cross sell, especially in the parts department. The most useful Marketing Automation tool captures leads from different sources and tracks customer routes to understand their interests, trigger engagement events, integrate with other software and capture campaign metrics. The best Marketing Automation combines your business development strategy with appropriate software. You want to be able to develop prospects with highly personalized content that helps convert them to happy, satisfied customers.

Omni-Channel Marketing is a cross-channel strategy to deliver appropriate content to enhance customer experience and driver better relationship interactions across all possible channels and customer touchpoints. Included are traditional and digital channels, and, physical and online experiences. Each channel works together to create a unified experience. Whether the customer is shopping online from mobile device or desktop, via phone or in the dealership, the experience will be seamless.

So, what’s the difference?

Multichannel Marketing refers to the ability to interact with potential customers on various platforms. A channel might be a print ad, an email, a retail location, a website, a promotional event, in person discussion. The objective is to get your message out on the maximum number of channels possible with consistency. The goal is to get the maximum number of customer engagements, so the customer is reminded again and again to purchase from you.

Omni-Channel Marketing refers to the multi-channel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience. The customer can be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, via phone, or in a dealership location, and the experience will be the same. The Omni-Channel interrelates every channel to ensure prospective customers are having a strong, positive experience throughout each and every channel. The goal is to build a stronger relationship between customer and dealer

Comprehensive Tool: Sharpspring

SharpSpring is an easy-to-use marketing automation and CRM tool that helps businesses get more sales by identifying which marketing efforts are delivering sales cost effectively

It consolidates all critical marketing activities, so you save on software license fees. For example, SharpSpring allows unlimited CRM users. You can send emails through the system, post social media and blogs, add a chatbot and form fills to your website, use display ads cost effectively when a visitor leaves your website to bring them back, and more!

The key features included are:

• Identify website visitors by name in real time and push notifications to designated employees via email and/or text
• Create and distribute email marketing campaigns to your lists
• Send emails to customers at critical points in the purchasing cycle to encourage them to buy
• Manage Social Media posting and blogging;
• Capture leads with an automated chatbot that engages website visitors;
• Retarget website visitors with display advertising to bring them back to your website to contact your business;
• Track and analyze lead engagement with media assets as well as all digital marketing touchpoints;
• Show form fills on your website to capture information about visitors quickly; and
• A full CRM that can scale to unlimited users without additional cost.

There are many more features available in SharpSpring to help businesses manage their marketing and sales from one tool. If you are interested in learning more and would like to take advantage of the discounted license prices offered by their Platinum Partner ClearTail Marketing, please contact Magee Clegg at mclegg@cleartail.com