How to Increase In-Store Sales at Your Equipment Dealership
Regardless of whether your equipment dealership is based in the busiest business district of the city or located in a narrow side street, being noticed by the customers is only half the battle. Once you have potential customers in your showroom, you need to provide a great experience to education them, showcase your equipment, and entice them to purchase the equipment they need from you.
Jocova Financial, October 24, 2022
Regardless of whether your equipment dealership is based in the busiest business district of the city or located in a narrow side street, being noticed by the customers is only half the battle. Once you have potential customers in your showroom, you need to provide a great experience to education them, showcase your equipment, and entice them to purchase the equipment they need from you.
In this article, we layout the top ways to increase in-store customer sales with tactics that are easily implemented no matter what your size or budget.
Be Seasonal; Have the Right Products for the Right Time of Year
All the sales training in the world won’t help you if you are not up to date with right seasonal products. Choose your seasonal products wisely based on industry and historical data and stick to proven best-selling items of the season. Plan ahead and build strategies, make a list of the events and the items you would be selling at that specific time frame.
Calculate your costs and expenses to know if the product will be profitable. Knowing the right time to sell seasonal products plays a major role, as there are times when the sale of a particular product increases. Understanding these tactics will make you ascertain when it best to proceed with your plans. Although this sounds simple, timing the right product at the right time can have a marked impact on your bottom line.
Invite Experts; Hold Seminars or Training; Highlight New products
Teach your sales force to prioritize and generate higher sales growth. Holding informative seminars and training is the best way to empower your retail leaders to take business to new levels of success; educating customers.
Furthermore, you can also host guest/expert seminars that you can invite your customers to attend for product knowledge and training. For instance, you can invite equipment manufacturers, regulators, industry service professionals all to present. This will help further associate your equipment dealership with industry expertise and a must visit place for their equipment purchases.
Make it a Social Experience
Customers are your priority and social experience is important, stores usually perform better when their associates maintain a natural service-based environment than when an experienced associate has the right skills but the wrong attitude towards customers.
What a customer could gain by visiting a store in person can shape opinions in a way that a digital brand could not. ‘Retailtainment’ is the latest trend that is taking over business, and customers are liking it too. It’s all about offering in-store entertainment — it might not necessarily lead to direct purchase immediately but to engage customers in the store.
Convert Online Searches to In-Store Purchases; Have a Digital Strategy
There is a large number of consumers who initiate their shopping online but still up to 90% online shoppers end up on local purchases. Adding rich details about your equipment showroom to your digital campaigns can help convert online research into in-store purchases. Furthermore, have amble product knowledge and videos on your website helps educate customers and come to you as the ‘expert’.
Design Stores for Sales (Cross-Selling & Related Products)
Cross-selling and related products are the terms used for marketing tools that can be used to offer your customers a few additional products they may like based on their shopping experience and relevant to their purchasing history. It might be a good chance for you to up-sell some more products. Both of these tools can be used simultaneously.
A lawnmower dealer, for example, might oil, gas cans, brown bags, and gloves at the checkout counter.
Focus on Staff Training – service, product knowledge, support
To run your business successfully, there’s one thing to focus more than anything else and that is happy customers. This happens when you develop a perfect match for a great product along with your sales team who have the product knowledge to support and satisfy customers.
Product knowledge and providing reliable customer support is the key. By creating a training strategy for your sales team you can make them able to perform at their best with confidence and this will ensure happy customers.
Moreover, having a trained staff for both sales and support service definitely leads to:
- Builds customer trust and improves sales
- Knowledgeable team who has confidence to face questions without referring to manuals or handbooks.
- Quicker solutions to customer’s paint points such as equipment financing to purchase versus the full equipment cost
- Positive feedback and reviews when a member of the team has been particularly responsive.
Have the Right Products and Inventory
Effective inventory management and having the right products is essential to ensure your store has enough of the items to meet customers’ needs. A well-managed inventory forms the muscles of any retail store and helps in reducing stock loss.
Forecasting the future is something that all equipment dealers need to perform if they want to have the right stock at the right time. It might be the toughest thing to do but this will make scaling up easier. Predict beyond understanding what’s selling now and develop a product strategy for the future while keeping in mind the latest trends in the market.
Services to Support Sales
Once a customer is interested in purchasing a piece of equipment, it is important that they have tools and services they need to complete the purchase. Such options could include; i) equipment financing and equipment leasing, so they can pay for equipment on a monthly payment plan, ii) warranty so that they know they are covered should anything go wrong iii) insurance on larger equipment purchases especially if they are on financing so if something happens the debt is covered, iv) return policy so the customer knows if the unit is not right from them they can return or exchange it.
Final Verdict
It is all about the customer! Start implementing some of these simple tactics today to increase sales and provide your customers with an exception in-store shopping experience that leaves customers ‘wowed’.
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