Some of the strongest, most important business relationships for a building product manufacturer are those they have with their local dealers.
It makes sense. Your dealers are the folks who interact and sell your brand’s products directly to end consumers. Ideally, you’ll want to get as many local dealers on your side as possible — while keeping them fiercely loyal to you (over your competitors) — in every geographical area where your brand exists.
By strengthening dealer loyalty, you’ll go a long way towards cementing your brand as the #1 solution for your product category in local areas. That, in turn, means great things for your business longevity and market share as a whole.
Here, we’ll explore 7 ways to increase the loyalty dealers feel towards your brand.
1. Implement Dealer Training
One of the strongest bonds you can forge in business is to share valuable knowledge.
A building materials manufacturer has an important leg up here: you can teach your local dealers about the best features of your products, and help them make more sales.
According to a Salesforce survey quoted by CGS, up to 48% of leading business-to-business companies want to increase sales performance as a primary objective. By educating dealers on the promise your products hold for the local market, you’ll go a long way towards boosting sales on both ends, and at the same time, your dealers’ willingness to stay connected to your brand.
Your dealer education program can be a mix of in-person meetings and videoconferencing, as long as it’s engaging and thoughtfully expresses the promise of your brand to local homeowners, commercial property owners, and other consumers.
In your training program, it helps to cover such topics as:
- Best use cases for your products
- Product features and benefits
- Customer testimonials
- Installation and maintenance guides
By furnishing your dealers with this information, they’ll be able to sell more of your products to more customers. You’ll also prove yourself to be a supportive, valuable business partner.
2. Generate Leads for Dealers with a Premium Locator Solution
Want to earn instant respect from local dealers? It’s simple: send them leads who are eager to make a purchase.
According to the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network, 85% of companies view strategic partnerships as essential to their business. That’s because great partnerships are rife with revenue-boosting potential for both sides. Many small local dealers are ready and willing to connect with building material brands that drive more foot traffic to their locations, while giving those brands more local exposure.
A great way to do this is by having a dealer locator web page that quickly and efficiently sends customers directly to those local retail partners. The best tech solution for achieving this is the Bullseye Dealer Locator software.
Use Bullseye to create responsive, fully-featured locator pages that conveniently point customers to local dealers who carry your products. Bullseye locators are much better than a dry, text-based list of retailers, because your listings will actually allow web users to submit inquiries. From there, you and your dealers can easily follow up.
Bullseye also adds these features to make the consumer-to-dealer funnel even more effective:
- Responsive, dynamic maps. Integration with Google Maps means consumers can use a familiar visual interface to find driving directions and fit a quick trip into their day.
- Inventory transparency. Bullseye allows seamless updating of local dealer inventory. Users will appreciate knowing which product lines are in stock where, making the decision to walk in and buy much easier.
- Events and promotions. Bullseye locator listings allow for even more enriched data, such as local dealer promotions to catch consumers’ eyes and convince them to pay a visit.
- Media galleries. Local dealers can use Bullseye to display their best photos, before/after comparisons, videos, and more.
Just by having a premium locator page that captures homeowners and other prospects as leads, you’ll be able to boost business for your local retail partners and demonstrate an ROI from the partnership, which only builds goodwill.
Bullseye is your ace in the hole when building a lead generation machine that galvanizes dealer loyalty. From your brand, to your local dealers, to the consumers who love your brand and show up at local dealers’ cash registers, everybody wins!
3. Enable Dealers as Channel Partners With Key Content Assets
Your dealers are your salesforce.
Of course, their role isn’t the same as that of the highly-qualified sales reps you have on staff, but your dealers do have face-to-face interactions with consumers who end up using your products in their homes and properties.
In a Forrester Research report quoted by Marq, companies using sales enablement tech to supply channel partners with useful content are up to 2.3x more effective at reaching their sales goals. Your dealers are key channel partners for your business, and you’ll want to enable them to powerfully promote your brand by giving them the right content assets: brochures, flyers, sell sheets, customer testimonials, and more.
RevBase, as the leading marketing asset management (MAM) software for building materials manufacturers, is the most effective tool for accomplishing that task.
RevBase lets you organize all of your marketing and sales assets — whether they are digital, print, or print-on-demand — and lets you share them with local dealers, track downloads and print queries, and provide seamless access across devices and platforms.
That means your dealers will instantly be able to answer consumer questions, share why and how your products work, and essentially be your eyes and ears on the ground when homeowners and other consumers are at the point of purchase. Give your dealers this kind of unprecedented access to your brand, and you’ll make it a snap for them to sell.
The result? They’ll stay loyal to your brand and come back for more.
4. Cross-Promote Events and Deals
Homeowners want high-quality products at great prices. They’re also drawn in by events, such as how-to seminars and classes where they can learn how to do DIY projects safely and efficiently.
That said, why not partner up with your dealers to promote coming attractions? It is a great way to drive up dealer foot traffic, help them sell more of your products, and ultimately deepen their loyalty to your building materials brand.
Have meetings with your dealers to see what kinds of deals local consumers have been responding to, and ask about their experience in hosting on-site events. From there, you can coordinate with them on creating those deals and events, and work together on digital marketing strategies like social media, email newsletters, and mobile QR codes to help get the word out in the area.
Track the success of these special promotions and events to discover what works best. Then, you’ll be able to approach new dealers with proven knowledge on sales-driving tactics, and encourage more long-term alliances.
5. Create a “Preferred Dealer” Program
If there are certain dealers who you feel particularly aligned with, and who have proven their ability to move more product and increase your local market share, consider highlighting them as Preferred Dealers.
Why is this important? Giving high-performing channel partners the public praise they deserve forges stronger relationships.
An article by Breezy quotes Mark Sochan, author of The Art of Strategic Partnering, in noting that up to 60-65% of strategic partnerships end up failing. You can avoid this dismal failure rate for your dealer relationships, as long as you choose great local dealers to partner with in the first place, and award special status to those who perform the best for your brand.
Consider creating a repeatable system for selecting dealers as “preferred” and highlighting them as such to end consumers. You can award this status to dealers based on any number of factors and benchmarks, including:
- High scores on assessments and tests that you administer as part of your dealer training program
- Consistent, high sales numbers for your products
- Long-standing relationships, or dealers who were “first movers” in selling your products in certain regions
Whatever metric you choose, make sure the dealers you designate as “Preferred” are consistently able to carry relevant product lines in stock, provide an excellent in-person customer experience, follow up on leads, and offer premium customer service. They should also have a great local reputation, evidenced by strong online reviews.
You’ll want to feature these dealers prominently on your local landing pages, and ideally right within your Bullseye-built dealer locator. After all, customers who are ready to buy will appreciate finding out about a trusted dealer who’s just a few miles away.
Suggesting these kinds of promotions and events, and then using best-in-class tools like Bullseye to open consumers’ eyes to them, will make your brand a hit with more local dealers!
6. Allow Dealers to Enhance Listings and Landing Pages
A great aspect of a premium dealer locator page, like the ones you can create with Bullseye, is that the listings aren’t just lines of plain text that have to be painstakingly updated manually. They’re dynamic capsules of useful information that can automatically be enhanced.
Even better, you can give the local dealers you work with a sense of control over these listings.
Through Bullseye’s secure dealer interface, you can grant dealers secure access to modify and enhance their listings with promotions, available inventory, and updated business contact info. All changes are subject to your approval, so that you don’t lose ultimate control over the information that customers see.
It goes even further than locator listings, however. Since Bullseye was built with the best practices in digital marketing in mind, it supports the dynamic creation of local SEO-friendly landing pages.
You can also allow your dealers to add info to these pages — which are linked to in their locator listings — such as certifications, services, project photos, in-depth information on local events, trends relevant to homeowners in the area, and more.
All of this works to build trust with dealers, and trust is foundational to loyalty. A Northwestern University study quoted in HBR found that retailers in high-trust relationships with manufacturers were 12% more committed, 22% less likely to have sought out other suppliers, and generally performed at higher levels for those manufacturers.
Broker long-term trust with dealers by letting them influence their small presence within your website (especially if your site is driving high-quality leads to them, thanks to a secure Bullseye integration) and they’ll have no reason to walk away.
7. Keep the Lines of Communication Open
All of these methods are essential to building dealer loyalty, and there’s one golden thread running throughout: communication.
As a building materials manufacturer wanting to have your hand in local markets, an open exchange of ideas and information with your dealers is key. In turn, you can provide immense value to small dealers who are looking to grow their businesses and achieve stable profits.
If you’re head and shoulders above other brands in this area, you’ll have few issues sustaining loyalty from dealers wherever you stake your claim.
You can be intentional about your communication by setting a regular schedule to meet in person, if at all possible. In a report by the Harvard Business Review, 95% of survey respondents agreed that face-to-face meetings are vital to long-term business relationships. However, phone or video calls can work in a pinch.
Be sure to share your collected learnings about what kind of messaging and sales approaches work for your products, as well as industry trends and forecasts to help dealers weather storms that can seriously threaten smaller businesses.
Your dealers will feel both heard and seen if you maintain a purposeful commitment to keep in touch. This will drive loyalty and build a stronger foundation for your brand wherever it has a presence.
There’s a side benefit, too: regular interaction and accountability will weed out those dealers who are less serious about sales strategy or less inclined to be loyal to any supplier. This will help you identify your true allies.
Empower Your Dealers to Do Better Business, and Enjoy the Side-Effect of Greater Loyalty
Many business initiatives are hard, both in theory and execution. To be worth the trouble, they have to make sense for your enterprise business goals.
That said, for building materials manufacturers looking to expand and reinforce their place in the market, one of the most worthwhile strategies to carry out is building unbreakable bonds with your local dealers.
The methods are many: drive leads to them, give them the resources needed to sell effectively, and communicate well and often. To give the strategy substance, however, you’ll need the right modern tools.
Use Bullseye if you want a robust, consumer-friendly dealer locator that sends your local partners qualified leads who are ready to buy. Use RevBase to efficiently share your most-powerful sales collateral with dealers who interact with end consumers day in and day out.
With the right software tools in your toolbox, it’ll be a snap to execute on these tips for increased dealer loyalty…and reap all the rewards for your brand.
Ready to revamp your dealer loyalty strategy and realize the benefits? Schedule your demos of Bullseye and RevBase today.
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