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Essential Machinery Selling Skills

Part 1:  DEAL Visibility or Awareness skills by Walter J. McDonald In this two-part article we will discuss essential machinery selling skills. Part 1 focuses on the skill set required to participate in a large percentage of the deals or potential sales in a machinery sales territory. Part 2 examines the skill set needed to… Continue reading Essential Machinery Selling Skills

Three Essential Tools for Dealers

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

How to Improve Off-Shelf Parts Fill Rate

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

Successful Key Account Management – Machinery Dealer Manager’s Handbook

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

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Utilizing Service Management Tools

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

Parts Management: Accelerating Performance

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

Participation Rates and Market Share

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

Building a Wildly Successful Machinery Rental Business

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