By Bill Wade, Wade & Partners
Every survey says it, ‘Quality, Availability and Price’ is how I buy. Do you buy this?
Turning value-added services into a profitable venture is walking a tightrope, because so many customers do tend to focus narrowly on price. That, in turn, pushes heavy-duty distributors and truck dealers to measure themselves against one another based on price—a trap that can easily push value-added services even further down that “must have” criteria list that fleet maintenance guys are using.
“Customers are frequently unaware of the special perks they receive from distributors,” writes Richard Vurva in If it’s free, where’s the value? “The reason is because many distributors do a poor job of measuring the value of the services they promise.
And while salespeople say they have adopted a value-added approach with customers very few “put a real dollar value on the services their companies provide. Even if they can quantify their company’s value-added services, they’re often careless in giving them away to customers who don’t deserve or need them,” says Vurva.
To break out of this mindset, heavy-duty distributors need to be very intentional about the value that they’re providing. Communicating that intention to your customers via your sales team, for example, which should be trained to offer (in exchange for a fee) these add-ons as part of a complete package. If your sales reps and countermen don’t see the value in the products being sold they’ll start giving stuff away instead of creating an environment for selling an even bigger package that includes both products and services.
Why Win a Race-to-the-Bottom?
