When we talk growth I suspect that most of you envision selling more new equipment. I appreciate that view. A couple of years ago a distributor that represented 18 different manufacturers told me that I’d be his friend for life if I could figure out how to keep those manufacturers from calling him all the time.
Aside from mergers and acquisitions there are just two ways to grow your distributorship’s revenue, and stop those calls!
- Many distributors fail to take full advantage of their opportunity to enjoy significant growth by selling more to their existing customers. It’s a huge and underutilized opportunity for boosting revenue.
- The other way to grow is to take business away from your competition.
We offer services that will enable you to take full advantage of both those opportunities. Below, are two graphs. Which one of them is most representative of how your distributorship’s growth looks over the past years?
I’ll bet you add new customers every day. If I’m right and the growth of your distributorship’s doesn’t look like Graph 2 then I am sorry, but you are leaking customers every day too. You cannot grow and thrive as long as your customers are leaking out of your revenue bucket. If you really want to grow you have got to stop, or at least reduce the rate at which you are losing customers to your competition.
The best, the easiest and certainly the most profitable way to stop losing customers is to increase your aftermarket sales. Does that seem too easy? Who said that the answer had to be hard?
The evidence is in. The easiest way to improve customer retention and make a bundle of money in the process is to improve your walletshare, or your share of aftermarket products and service sales sold to your customers. The more equipment, products and services that your customers buy from your distributorship the longer they stay. Here’s why.
If you are not providing the material handling equipment, products and services that your customers need where do you suppose they are they going to go to get them? The only answer I can think of is from your competition. Is that what you want them doing?
Improving your walletshare has another plus. You can plow the added cash flow and profits into taking increasing amount of business away from your competition. Growing walletshare by increasing your aftermarket sales of products and services is always win/win.
Decide today to stop leaking customers by growing your walletshare. In a couple of months you will be glad that you did. Then plow a portion of the profits into taking business away from the competition. If you can afford both today then why not do both?
We are Growing Marketshare 365 and we are the largest provider of Unlimited Exclusive Leads to equipment distributors throughout North America. If you would like to have a conversation with us about how we can help you grow your revenue, please click here.
