If you are part of a dealership network, it is essential that you formulate some business strategies to manage them. Like any other channel partners, there are multiple ways to boost your investment and ensure that you make the most out of it. Forming a dealership network can have a major impact on your revenue and reach, but only if you make an effort to engage and communicate, helping your dealers to stay informed on your products, your goals, and your desired brand experiences.
With this in mind, here are five steps you should take after forming that network, ensuring that you utilise your management skills and stay ahead of your competition:
Prepare For The Future
Although you’ve only just entered into a dealership network, it is essential that you start by preparing for the future. As mentioned previously, a dealership network should be managed in the same way that you manage any channel partners – by keeping them in the loop and ensuring that they remain incentivised to distribute and sell your products.
By looking into dealer incentives, you can educate your forecourt staff on new products, models and USPs while also ensuring the quality of aftercare, promoting finance packages, and gleaning customer insight and data while you do so. A strong dealership network will put your company into the sales fast lane, but they need their own incentives to achieve that, so make sure you have those incentives assured now and in the future.
Get To Know Individuals And Space
Communication is one of the most important things to get right in business, but even more so when you are running a network that spans nationwide. One of the things that many companies get wrong is engaging dealerships with impersonal messages, relaying information which might be of no use to the dealer, and without getting any personalised information back.
While managing a network, it is important to get to know every dealer on a face-to-face basis, understand their own organisation, and where they sit in conjunction with other distributors and potential competitors. As well as this, you should constantly be looking to pinpoint new areas of interest. Strategise new dealer visits by investigating areas and addresses that are under or over-served. If you do this, then you can build your coverage and welcome new channel partners while also working to reduce overlaps and cannibalisation.
Focus On The Data
Lastly, you should understand the importance of data in business and how you can assimilate it into your own operations. For instance, every dealership will be gleaning different data that can give you a good indication of the area, your consumers, and how your own company is performing.
This data can then be used to target your marketing and, once again, avoid cannibalization. In the automotive industry, specifically, canniblization can be incredibly damaging, which makes it crucial to attaining all the intelligence you can to avoid it. Make sure you always focus on what you are selling and how your products might perform according to localized, individual data.
