enBuilding agility and resiliency into your sales strategy is all about diversifying your approach strategically, while identifying the best ways to reach your customers. Many companies reach a point in which expanding internally can only get them so far, or it just doesn’t make business sense at the time.
How can they continue to grow in a sustainable way?
That’s where dealer sales come in.
Investing in a dealer network and equipping your partners with the tools to sell effectively for you gives you the power to expand your reach. In theory, this approach offers virtually limitless scalability. In practice, however, there are some challenges you’ll run into that can get in the way of growing effectively. Here’s one of the big ones:
How can you help your partners sell effectively for you and ensure a consistent customer experience?
In this article, we’ll identify ways you can create consistency in your sales process, regardless of who’s selling on your behalf, as well as examine some strategies to increase dealer sales.
Growth Trends in the Dealer Sales Market
Digital transformation has impacted virtually every industry, as businesses automate more manual processes and equip their employees with powerful digital tools. For the dealer sales market, embracing digital transformation is also about enabling companies to collaborate more effectively.
One of the dominant sales trends in 2024 has been the acceleration of hybrid sales strategies and the evolution of omnichannel commerce, according to McKinsey & Company. With B2B customers using 10 different channels to shop, on average, it’s more important than ever to ensure a consistently positive experience. This means there are more opportunities for engagement, but it also means you need to leverage each channel effectively. That can be a lot more difficult when it’s not your internal team selling.
When it comes to increasing dealer sales, there are a few things to think about:
- How can we enable our partners to sell more effectively and easily?
- How can we ensure product data is always up to date and consistent, internally and externally?
- How can we create common processes and a standardized way of operating with our partners?
- How can we share best practices with our partners?
The main thing to keep in mind is that your products aren’t always going to be the core focus of your partners’ businesses. Research from Gartner shows that it takes more than six months to onboard new salespeople, and your partners may not always have the same level of product knowledge your sales team does.
Factors Affecting Dealer Sales
Although there are a lot of external factors that impact dealer sales, we’re going to focus on process-related and other internal factors that you can control. Things get a little complicated when you consider the number of different organizations that may be involved in a robust dealer network. So, we’ll also explore some of the ways organizations and dealers can collaborate more effectively and strengthen their partnerships.
1. Inventory Management and Selection
Efficient inventory management is a pivotal component to dealers’ success. Dealers need up-to-date product information and a clear view of their own sales to effectively manage inventory. However, the processes related to sharing this information often involve a lot of phone calls and/or emails. Fortunately, those steps can be removed and automated with the right solutions, removing headaches for everyone involved.Inventory diversity is also a contributing factor for success. Offering a diverse range of products enables dealers to cater to a broader customer base and capture different market segments, but it can also add more complexity to the sales process. This is really a matter of figuring out what to do with the efficiency you gain as you invest in new tools; offering a larger variety of products or product configurations becomes a lot easier when it doesn’t take as much time or manual work to configure them.
2. Customer Service and Satisfaction
Businesses want their dealers to represent their brands well, and this means delivering exceptional customer service and satisfaction. For B2B organizations, this can be especially challenging. The products are often specialized or technical, requiring specific knowledge to answer customer questions. The range of products and industries also means that you could be working with organizations accustomed to drastically different sales cycles.
So, how do you get everyone on the same page?
The first step is to identify the core information that any salesperson needs to sell your products. Then, you need to figure out how to share it. This may include product knowledge sessions, technical support and sales training. For organizations with Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software, features like guided selling can also help a lot here — if all the knowledge needed to sell is included in the process, it takes a lot less training for someone to maximize their potential.
The bottom line? Well-informed dealers are better equipped to address customer inquiries, handle objections, and effectively close sales.
3. Importance of Experienced Sales Staff
Experienced sales staff within dealer networks bring invaluable expertise and industry knowledge. Retaining the top sales talent will always be a big challenge, and it’s something that’s often out of your control. However, there are still some things you can do to minimize the impact of turnover and encourage talent to stay with your business.
Shortening the onboarding process helps everyone involved, and it helps salespeople reach their full potential faster.
It’s also important to consider how the best salespeople spend their time. If it takes a lot of manual effort to configure and price a quote, any frustrations with the process will be amplified over a dealer network. Plus, there’s more value in automating repetitive tasks the more you scale.
4. Understanding the Sales Process
Businesses must have a clear understanding of the sales process within their dealer channels. This involves understanding sales pipelines, identifying potential bottlenecks, and implementing strategies to expedite the sales cycle. It’s important to remember that this will be an ongoing and evolving process, as your needs and capabilities change.
For example, you might not be ready to launch a dealer portal right away; you must have your own processes and sales strategies refined and optimized before you can get the most value from that kind of investment. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work toward launching one. Many Experlogix clients establish dealer portals as a long-term goal that they can work toward after the initial foundation for success is built internally.
Investing in those kinds of solutions isn’t just about efficiency. Just as customers want speed and convenience, dealers are going to notice the organizations that are easiest to work with (and the easiest to sell for).
Businesses should also foster open communication, collaborate on marketing initiatives, and seek feedback to continuously improve service delivery. Building trust and mutual respect strengthens partnerships and encourages long-term loyalty.
Dealer Sales in Different Industries
We’ve looked at some of the factors that are likely to influence dealer sales. Now, let’s take a look at a couple of different industries and look at some real-world examples of how Experlogix clients have grown their dealer networks.
Dealer Sales in the Construction Equipment Market
The global construction equipment market was estimated to be worth more than $142 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $237 billion by 2023., according to research from Fortune Business Insights. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the sector especially hard, but this challenge has been offset to some degree by the introduction of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, which can power a variety of value-added services and analytics.
Smarter construction equipment, powered by the IoT tech, enables both businesses and their dealers to collect and leverage a wealth of data about machine performance, maintenance and usage patterns. This also means that companies in the industry face increasing sales complexity, as the range of products and services they can sell expands.
For example, construction equipment dealers could use IoT-enabled devices to identify machines that are most in need of maintenance to minimize downtime for their customers. This kind of data can also be used to create comprehensive usage and maintenance reports, so that customers can better track costs and maintenance cycles for large machine fleets.
Dealers can also leverage this data to tailor equipment configurations and functionalities to better suit specific customer needs. By offering customizable solutions that are tailored to their actual customers, these companies can differentiate themselves in a competitive market and cater to niche segments more effectively.
Furthermore, understanding how customers utilize their equipment allows companies to offer proactive recommendations for upgrades or modifications that align with their customers’ ever-evolving requirements. This proactive approach not only strengthens customer relationships, it also builds the company’s brand by creating a reputation for responsiveness and innovation.
Experlogix Client Spotlight: Volvo Construction Equipment
Volvo CE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of construction equipment in the world, providing its global client base with premium machines and services. Like many organizations, Volvo started to recognize that legacy processes and tools would get in the way of sustainable growth; the old process relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual copying and pasting order information.
This was frustrating and time-consuming for their internal sales team, and it meant that its dealers had no way to consistently follow its sales strategy. For example, one of Volvo’s leading dealers, Swecon, faced similar challenges from its own legacy tools and processes. The company’s old configurator couldn’t be easily adjusted, making it difficult to update if new configurations or products became available from Volvo.
As it streamlined its own processes, Volvo sought to better support dealers across different regions. Integrating Experlogix CPQ with Microsoft Dynamics 365 allowed the company to remove its reliance on spreadsheets and manual approval processes. The newly streamlined process and integrated system also meant that it could ensure a consistent sales experience across its global dealer network.
Dealer Sales in the Protective Equipment Market
Protective gear can include a wide range of products, from commonly used personal protective equipment like safety goggles to highly specialized gear like firefighting equipment.
In the case of the latter, the fire safety equipment market alone is valued at $49.82 billion and is expected to grow steadily through 2030, It’s also a great example of how the shift toward digital solutions has impacted a mature market.
Like many industries, this sector has been driven in part by smarter technology; more advanced smoke detectors for example, alert emergency response teams to incidents sooner. At the same time, our knowledge regarding the dynamics of fire and how to protect people from extreme heat continues to grow, leading to innovations in how firefighters’ wearable gear is made. This has also made it possible to make the gear highly customizable.
Manufacturers and dealers of protective equipment must prioritize accuracy when fulfilling orders. Equipment must often be customized to the user, and these products must also meet regulatory requirements regarding their effectiveness. And it’s not just heat that is a concern. The wrong firefighting suit might still protect the user from heat, but if the fit is wrong, it could also limit mobility and cost valuable seconds in an emergency.
Experlogix Client Spotlight: INNOTEX
INNOTEX has built its legacy on providing high-quality, yet affordable equipment for fire departments around the world. As it looked for ways it could continue to grow while maintaining its reputation for excellent products, it realized that it would need to implement a new system that could empower its global dealer network.
The old process was especially cumbersome for its dealers. Dealers submitted requests for quotes via phone, and then INNOTEX would fax confirmation back to them. Often times, the final order would be so large that it would need to be mailed; this also meant that any changes would require the order to be mailed back and forth again.
One of the biggest challenges? As a small company, it didn’t have a dedicated IT team to investigate and manage solutions. INNOTEX needed a way to streamline its quote and order process that wouldn’t require a lot of technical knowledge to use but could handle the complexity of its products.
By creating a fully integrated solution built around Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, the company created a portal for dealers to use CPQ. This gave INNOTEX the power to stop invalid configurations from going through, while also removing the calling, faxing and mailing back-and-forth that the old process required.
The Future of Dealer Sales
It’s no secret that B2B customers are starting to expect the same speed and convenience that B2C customers enjoy. As a result, a lot of the near-term focus for increasing dealer sales will be on enabling self-service at scale. Many organizations will continue focusing on speed and convenience, making this less of a differentiating factor.
As self-service becomes more commonplace, focusing on customer experience will become even more important. Speed and convenience are part of the equation, but as noted by McKinsey & Company, B2B customers are expecting a few must-haves:
- Performance guarantee
- Real-time customer service
- Product availability shown online
- Consistent experience across different sales channels
- Ability to purchase from any channel
As the research indicates, the quality of the sales experience is just as important as the speed. Customers want product information to be readily available, and they want access to support, regardless of which channel they use.
As more B2B organizations undergo digital transformation, it’ll be increasingly important to consider how they can equip dealers with knowledge and tools to engage customers more effectively. This could be as simple as providing more product documentation with a standard quote to proactively answer customers’ questions. However, a truly unified approach that focuses on collaboration and that makes the process easy for dealers to follow will deliver a lot more ROI.
