The market is under stress; the economy is troubled; the banking system is suffering from the “Bear Stearns and Northern Rock” syndrome; now is the perfect time to reinvigorate your market coverage. It is during times of trouble and difficulties that excellence is born. That means we have quite an opportunity.

Our customers have always wondered about us in difficult times. Many of you have reduced the number of salesmen that you have had covering your customers during times like this in the past. It used to be a common thought that the product support salesmen were just involved in keeping up good relations; perhaps just a “delivery man” of parts; a gopher – and an expensive one at that.

How wrong could we have been?

The market coverage opportunities that are in front of every dealership are astounding. Once more the Product Support Opportunities handbook tells us the story. More customers are defecting now than they were five years ago. What could that be telling us?

I want to start with a different slant this month. I want “management” to participate in our market coverage approach. I want each of the parts managers, service managers, and general managers to be assigned to cover 10 customers each. And who are the managers’ customers? They are the largest of our parts and service accounts. These are the customers whom we want to retain. We want to broaden our penetration of their business. We want to become their primary supplier. Who better than the leaders in the parts and service groups for this task? So there is the start.

If you have one parts manager and one service manager and one general parts and service manager then that is the top 30 customers that will be covered by management.

The remaining customer coverage strategy remains the same. Do the market segmentation. Calculate the machine population, the parts relationship reflected in the parts purchases, the service relationship reflected by the service purchases, payment patterns, term of the relationship, etc. From this we can determine the number of parts and service salesmen who are required. Cover all of the fleet and large machine ownership, which is more than 13 machines, all of the A and B purchase relationships, which is the top 25 percent of each of the parts and service sales and determine the number of customers involved. Divide this number by 150 and that is the number of salesmen that you need to have in the field.

It’s Worth It
Oh, I know that it is a bigger number of positions than you currently employ. But please think about it. Parts and service determine the profitability of the dealership. Parts and service determine the customer retention. And parts and service determine which machine the customer will buy next. The two groups are critically important to us. Once you have the numbers established then set up the territories to be in balance if possible. Do not think as much about geography as you have in the past. Think about the relationship between the customer and the salesman. With which customers do we want to maintain our position and have a “hugger” as the salesman? You know the type – the person everyone likes, and the person who is thorough and conscientious. With which customers to you want to grow your relationship and have a “hunter” as the salesman? This is a completely different type of person. You know this person as well – pushy, aggressive, friendly but focused; a “closer.”

One caution: Watch out for the territories that have too many machines. As you know, the number of machines drives the potential of each customer. It also drives the potential of the territories. We do not want to have a salesman overmatched between the potential of the customers and the capacity of the salesman.

Let’s go the rest of the way, too. Let’s set up the territories for coverage with a telephone. All of the medium population customers and the C purchases now need to be assigned for coverage. Take the list of these customers and divide it by 100 and that will be the number of people that you need to have covering this market segment. Call five a day and suddenly customers who have not seen anyone from your dealership for a long time are being contacted regularly.

Many of you will think that this market coverage is a nice idea but very expensive. But contrast this strategy to the cost of losing 15 percent of your parts and service customers every year, which dealers seem to have become rather complacent about. That is the defection rate from the most recent customer surveys. You probably don’t even want to think about how to put a cost on that.

Wouldn’t it just be better to do the right thing and have the right market coverage in place?