I have just completed a Product Support Marketing class in which we established territories, set up compensation programs for parts and service sales for a group of dealers. It was very revealing and not just for them but also for me.

What was remarkable was the surprise that each of the dealers had on
the information that we used to arrive at the conclusions for each of them.
This is pretty standard stuff but let me just review it so that everyone is on
the same page.

Get an excel spreadsheet file of your parts and service customers with the
parts purchases and services purchases on it for 2006 and 2005 if you can.
Then insert three separate columns in the file. One will be for the parts segment, one for the service segment and one for the parts and service segment.

There are some mundane steps in here but please humor me and go through
this exercise.

1. Find out the total number of parts and service customers.
2. Sort the file in descending parts sequence.
   
   Put a “0” in the parts segment column for the first 10% of the customers Put a “1” in the parts segment for the next 15% of the customers
   Put a “2” in the parts segment for the next 25% of the customers
   Put a “3” in the parts segment for the last 50% of the customers
   
   
3. Sort the file in descending service sequence.
   
   Put a “0” in the parts segment column for the first 10% of the customers Put a “1” in the parts segment for the next 15% of the customers
   Put a “2” in the parts segment for the next 25% of the customers
   Put a “3” in the parts segment for the last 50% of the customers
   
   
4. Then add the parts segment and the service segment together
   and put the result in the third column.
   
   
5. Now sort the file in descending sequence of the combined segment.
   
   
6. Anything that has a segment code of “5” or less should be covered
   by a parts and service salesman.

How many customers you have in these parts and service segments determines how many parts and service salesmen you should have in the field. This isn’t about opinions or feelings it is about pure and simple marketing principles.

These groups of your customers are the top 25% of the parts customers in purchases and the top 25% of your service customers in their purchases.
These two segments codes were combined into one market segmentation
code for simplification.

So how many customers did this exercise turn up for you? How many Product Support salesmen should you have in the field? How many do you have in the field? Are the number that you should have and the number that you do have
the same?

Well to be honest with you what surprised me in this recent exercise was the number of salesmen that we needed to have in the field. We should take the names of the customers identified and divide them into territories that have between 100 and 150 customers. The number might even be lower than 100 depending on the number of machines that each of these customers have in their fleets. This is where we fall on tough times as most of you do not have accurate machine populations. Well you can start with the territories as we outlined above and then require that each salesman bring in as the first order of territory management a complete and accurate machine population listing for each
of the customers in their territories.

Well there you have it; a straight forward approach to a controversial subject. How many parts and service salesmen should you have in the field? Not a matter of opinion but of marketing facts. Now you need to establish sales objectives for each of these customers and a coverage model that determines the number of calls each of these customers deserves to have each year. Then you need to develop the sales tools for each of the parts and services that you are selling to your customers. And at last we get to the market share and customer retention discussions we should be having with each salesman. Now we can sell. Now that is interesting. How many of your parts and service salesmen have been to
a selling class? How many of you have computer sales presentations; or handouts; or cutaways or testimonials? We have a lot more to do don’t we?
But we will continue next month.

Before closing let me repeat what I said last month. You need more Product Support Salesmen. NOW.