Information Confusion: Selling with Dealers in Specialty Vehicle Industry
So you are tasked with this challenge as a Director or VP of Channel Sales, Marketing Operations or Channel Management: How to get the most accurate product information to your indirect dealer channel faster than your competitors and turn that speed into profits?
“Every single product we have is different,” says Peter Guile, CEO of fire truck manufacturer, E-ONE. “Every fire department decides what its needs and requirements are … and have specific views on how a fire truck should be built and configured.”
E-ONE is a customer of the Cincom Acquire Sales and Product Configurator and has experienced the challenges of selling complex products through indirect dealers firsthand. They have also been able to attain financial performance gains as a result of investing in making their quoting and configuration processes as streamlined and market-driven as possible.
“We want to be able to get our product information to our dealers to configure products to get [sales] in the door as fast as we can,” says Larry Shevanar, E-ONE’s director of information technology.
Eliminating Proposal Review
Sales and product configuration tools, such as Cincom Acquire, can eliminate the need for dealers and vendors to go back and forth verifying the accuracy of proposals. Ron Wilson, a dealer for E-ONE, explains in the video below how something as simple as being the first to provide a client a proposal gives him a competitive advantage.
“We’re ahead of the curve a little bit with our competition because we can have a two-hour meeting with a customer and leave him with something in his hands for him to review. Our competitor is doing the same thing but it’s going to take a week and a half for them to get drawings or the specs back to the chief.”
But providing accurate information on-site does more than just make you the first to give the client a proposal.
“We’re able to build a truck with the [fire] chief,” continues Wilson. “It gives them a little bit of ownership on that product.”
E-ONE and other manufacturers have found that when a prospect has a sense of autonomy over how their configuration will look and control of its specific functions, prospects turn into customers more often than if they were sold only what was in stock.
Dealer Networks Easier to Develop with Better Product Information
“We recently recruited a new dealer from a competitor and on his visit to E-ONE we gave him a pretty detailed review of our quote-to-order application based on the Cincom technology and he was blown away,” says Shevanar.
“The amount of information that they could get, the amount of configurations that they could design and develop very quickly and the amount of illustrations and drawing that they could provide to the customer in a very short amount of time really blew him away and he saw it as a competitive advantage in his market.”
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About the Author: Donna Hedge Burns is a public relations specialist for Cincom Systems, who specializes in ERP, product configuration and other smart selling technologies.