Boots on the Ground
What do your distribution partners value most in their sales operations? In our experience, it’s customer foot traffic above all else. Digital leads, phone calls, website visits — they’re all valid means of providing value to your dealers. But if you want to win their hearts and minds (and wallet share), then driving prospective customers into their dealership location is your best bet.
But this moment of “bodies in the door” can be a loaded one. There’s danger in these waters, in the form of sharks looking for a sale — any sale. Brand preference, product offers, pre- and post-sales relationship building…there’s a dozen factors at work in proving and providing value. And it’s a three way street, because the dealer isn’t the only entity exchanging value here. The prospective customer is seeking it. And you’re seeking it too. So how can the OEM give their distribution partners more of what they want, while also capturing value for themselves and creating value for the customer? And while we’re at it, can we also prep the consumer for what they need, too? You bet we can.
What Dealers Want (value)
If you were to ask a salesperson, “what is best in life?,” after a closed deal and a commission, you’d probably hear something about a “ready-to-buy prospect.” We often work backwards from there to an “interested-and-engaged prospect,” a “prospect in-market,” and then “prospects out-of-market” (future prospects).
Time and again, we and OEMs have heard the phrase, “just get me the leads; we’ll do the rest to close the buyer.”
But stop me if you’ve heard this before: you send more leads, and you hear back, “the volume is great, but we need more quality leads.” Alternatively, if you’ve been sending high-quality, in-market leads, you’ve likely heard “the lead quality is great, but can you please send more of them?” OEMs know and value having a large pool of prospects, not just the ones near purchase. By contrast, dealers are looking to maximize their time selling to interested buyers, not window shoppers.
So how do we do both and provide a large pool of interested buyers? We can connect the dots — and often in the case of a non-brand-exclusive dealer location, we should stack the deck in your OEMs favor. Here’s how.
Pick me, pick me! (Brand and product preference)
Branding can often be an afterthought for manufacturers. Sure, there’s considerations given to brand guidelines, and sometimes storytelling. Often, these efforts fall short. Not just short of attracting and warming up prospects to an OEM, but short of setting product preference too.
If you’ve minded your “Four Ps of Marketing” (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), then you know “Product” is an important part of the game of marketing. And in referencing our knowledge about what consumers need, we know that they’re looking for the best product that’s a perfect fit for them, in their price range (another one of those “Four Ps”). OEMs must come alongside both their dealers and prospective customers in these moments.
If the best prospect is the one that’s on a lot and is informed about what they want and ready to buy, then the OEM has a responsibility to help them get there. Helping prospects solve the “what is best” and “is it right for me” questions is essential to warming them up for a dealer or distributor location. It’s not about just driving them there — the OEM has to do a lot of the informing, education, and preference setting, too.
This is even more important for your distributors or dealers who carry more than just your brand of products, those non-exclusive (mixed-lot) dealers — or at places like trade shows where there are dozens of alternative products of what a buyer wants. In these instances, you don’t want a prospect browsing and kicking the tires, so to speak. You have to win the battle before the prospect and the salesperson even meet on the battleground — and that comes from delivering a delightful experience and establishing product preference before a prospect ever sets foot on the lot.
And in lead handoff moments, it’s not enough to have helped the prospect learn about your brands and your products; and it’s not enough to just solve what’s best and the right fit for them. The very next thing the prospect is going to try and solve is, “where do I buy it?” And this is where the savvy OEMs win the game — in getting an unfamiliar prospect to a specific sales location, while not only knowing what they want, but who they want to buy it from.
Making the Connection (Getting them there)
Verified Walk-Ins (VWIs) are a metric that advertisers use to confirm a prospect has seen an ad on their device(s), and that same (or a related) device was later seen at a dealer/distributor location.
OEM advertising offers loads of opportunities to get in front of your prospective customers, get them familiar with your brand and products, and begin to pique their interest. But is it enough to drive what dealers crave — those prospects at a sales location? How do we get them to the Place (there’s one of those “Four Ps of Marketing” again) where the magic happens?
We’ve recently written about dealer programs, and these can be the lynchpin in the OEM to dealer prospect lead handoff. These programs use some of the following to stay in front of the prospect:
- Digital (especially video)
- Direct mail
- Interactive point of sale materials
- Dealer locations, trade shows, and in-unit content
- Out-of-home
In the best of programs, materials are co-branded between the OEM and their dealers — which, along with strong email introductions that go to the prospect the same time a dealer receives a lead, go a long way towards a delightful customer experience. Specific tactics can also be deployed that are very dealer specific, but informed by the OEM so that brand standards are maintained and product preferences are instilled. With VWIs, this gives us an opportunity to confirm a prospect has seen an ad on their device, and that same device was later seen at a dealer location.
Checkmate? Not quite — but VWIs are a great way to track how effective an OEMs advertising can be in driving foot traffic to specific sales locations. But marketing communications — ads, emails, billboards, point of sale, and more — aren’t enough to close the deal before the prospect walks onto the lot.
You Drive a Hard Bargain, Mister (Offers)
Remember our “Four Ps?” They’re back — now in the form of Price and Promotion. Buyers love a deal. Every purchase is emotional first, then logical. Your dealers know this, your finance teams and pricing advisors know this. You’ve likely set MSRP, your product margins, and your dealer sales agreements in such a way to allow dealers some flexibility in sales while remaining attractive to prospective buyers enough to keep them interested before the wheeling and dealing starts.
So…pricing-related offers are the best, right? Hang on. Ask yourself: has every price-related offer worked? Has it ever devalued the brand? Likely, the OEM doesn’t want to flood the market with price incentives, so we’ve got to think outside the box here.
Fortunately, you can combine other offers with some unique tactics to help get foot traffic, and help your OEM’s marketing team get some credit too (more on that in a moment). Prospective buyers love a deal — but the deal doesn’t always have to be price.
Manufacturers who stand behind their work are the ones that build brand loyalty, so why not mix in warranty or service-related deals? Imagine one year of free guaranteed maintenance, or a long-term service package discount…or even a lifetime discount on parts and repairs. That’s a motivator.
If your OEM has a well-known brand that builds fans of the logo itself, you’ve got yet another offer level to pull: merchandise. Ecommerce offers, on-site swag at the time of purchase, and other incentives can help drive sales (and make dealers feel great, when they get to hand over some fresh new threads to a brand new customer). There’s also some loyalty plays here — swag that acknowledges repeat buyers as an exclusive club? Sign me up.
Now, let’s tie it all together. Prospects love deals. Dealers love foot traffic. What do you love? Return on investment. And we can’t get that without tracking.
Sharing in the Glory (Tracking)
You’re likely thinking at this point, “this sounds great, but it always feels like our brand-level marketing is never connected back to a sale. We know it matters — but can’t prove it matters.” Or can you?
Aside from connecting every CRM together, there are other ways to track the effectiveness of the OEM’s marketing efforts, even if the dealer/distributor’s sales network isn’t perfectly connected to create closed loop reporting. And the power is in your prospects’ hands — literally.
Combining the offers above with incentive to visit a dealer in order to qualify is the magic sauce here. Want the new swag with a new purchase? Schedule a test drive — bring this (email, certificate, etc.) into your local dealer, and we’ll deliver your reward.
Using a QR code or another similar tracking method on your offer, which must be redeemed at a sales location, can be instrumental in not only driving foot traffic to dealers/distributors, but also in tracking success of an OEM’s marketing initiatives. Your offers must be tracked accordingly for the dealer to get credit, too — incentivize them appropriately to participate. Now you’ve got a self-sustaining method of matching the offer with the prospect, and the prospect with the sale.
Is it foolproof? No. But connecting offers with physical redemption at a location can go a long way towards not only showing the dealers how effective your mar-comms can be, but in getting credit for your advertising dollars at work.
The Long and the Short of It
Taken as a whole, driving prospects to dealer locations, with brand and product preference, getting credit for ad dollars, and connecting the activity to sales…well, it’s not simple by any means. But, taking a bigger-picture approach and looking for the win-win in your engagement with both prospects and dealers can help connect what has always felt like disparate efforts into a well-oiled machine. And that’s what you’re building here after all, right? Simple it is not, but a well-engineered marketing strategy that connects the dots for prospects and lands them right where the dealers want them is worth the investment.
