As a global building materials manufacturer, your business ecosystem likely features a key group of players: excellent distribution partners.
The discoverability of your distributors can mean everything to the success or failure of your operations, from one country to the next. Your sales reps, dealers, and other professional third parties need to know how to find them.
That’s where international distributor locator software comes in. To stay on top as a global brand, you’ll want a locator tool that can actually help you galvanize networks of business partners, sales reps, and end consumers.
There are 5 top features to look for in a distributor locator platform. If your solution adheres to these principles, you’ll put your building materials brand in the best place to succeed abroad.
(Want to know the one solution that hits all the marks? It’s Bullseye Locations. That said, keep reading to discover why all the features Bullseye offers are important for your international distributor locator software.)
1. An Easy-to-Use Search Experience Across Languages
If you’re looking to enhance buyer-distributor relationships through your web presence, your locator can play a huge role. For starters, ensure your locator is accessible in the native languages of your target markets.
According to stats gathered by Babbel, only 20% of the world’s inhabitants speak English, and most aren’t native speakers. If your brand makes the effort to communicate in the local language, you’ll be more in touch with cultural nuances and buying triggers while instantly making customers more comfortable.
Choose a locator software that can easily adapt to the language of your customers. By doing so, you’ll eliminate friction and put more of your prospects in touch with distributors without forcing them to use third-party translation tools.
This way, wherever your brand makes a foray, you’ll improve your chances of fitting in and building comfort with the market right away.
2. An Intuitive Regional Map
Not all of your transactions will fall within neatly-defined international borders. Your distributors might only be in a small region in the target country, or even within a region that extends across borders and encompasses multiple countries.
This is a challenge for some locator tools. If your solution is only capable of presenting maps to web users in a limited format, your prospects may well find the distributor search experience frustrating.
To avoid this, you’ll need locator software that allows you to freely define regions by a range of criteria. This can include geographic search by district, city, and postal code, as well as search options that show distributors within custom-defined regions.
Options like these help create a good web user experience (UX) for your customers. According to stats gathered by intechnic, a well-designed user interface can raise your website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, and better UX design could increase it by up to 400%.
This particularly applies to your distributor locator, an essential part of your site.
Because the locator is so crucial to strengthening your international building materials business ecosystem, it deserves an optimized UX.
A regional locator map with convenient geographic search options will help you achieve just that online.
The Ability to Display Region-Specific Inventory
As a large enterprise building materials brand, you likely don’t sell every single item you produce through every dealer.
Maybe some of your product lines only make sense in specific areas, such as weather-resistant building frame systems in monsoon-prone coastal regions, or sustainable roofing materials for “green” residential markets.
Accordingly, you might only sell a limited, highly-specific subset of your goods to certain distributors, depending on regional demand.
Now, consider the retailers, contractors, and other parties who are looking up regional distributors on your brand’s website. Let’s say they’re looking to buy specific products in bulk, whether for resale or direct professional use. Are you clearly showing those prospects which product lines and how many items you’re making available locally?
If not, you need to. Your distributor locator is the #1 place on your website to do so.
EY’s 2022 team survey found supply chain visibility to be a top strategic priority for global executives, but only about 37% are seeing improvement within their organizations. In other stats shared by Zippia, only 6% of firms report full supply chain visibility, while 69% of companies are lacking in that area.
A locator webpage that clearly shows the stock your global distributors carry will go a long way towards “defogging” your supply chain, establishing trust, and incentivizing repeat business for your building materials brand.
The benefits go beyond basic trust and brand loyalty. Inventory transparency is also crucial to the business operations of retailers and contractors who buy from your distributors.
By giving your professional buyers full clarity on current and upcoming product availability, you’ll help them keep their own catalogs up to date. They’ll be better able to forecast sales, gauge their ability to allow backorders from consumers, and determine which kinds of local services are most feasible for them to offer.
Long story short? Be transparent on inventory, right within the search-generated distributor listings. Use a locator tool built to handle distributor data at scale, and that stays up-to-date with little housekeeping.
The Ability to Capture Leads
To compete effectively in local markets abroad, you’ll need to hold on to your likeliest prospects wherever you find them. That means capturing the information of leads who come to your website looking for distributors.
Once you do that, you can reach out to those prospects, share their contact details with distributors, and nurture buying journeys…all while gathering valuable business intelligence about local building materials economies.
That said, having a distributor locator that generates leads is a no-brainer. This is especially true if you’re doing business in multiple countries and want:
- Better insights into local market needs and specific opportunities,
- A stronger sense of your brand’s viability vis-à-vis the regional competition,
- The ability to prove ROI to your global distributors down the line, thus earning their loyalty.
In a CMI survey cited by ZoomInfo, 85% of B2B marketers identified lead generation as their most important content marketing challenge. Your locator can do much of the work for you, as long as the underlying tech allows it to capture lead contact details and securely share the data with the right parties.
(Beyond your existing distributors, those parties might include regional sales reps who have local distributor connections and 1-to-1 contact with promising leads.)
All in all, the more remote your operations become, the more you’ll want to keep tabs on how many customers are coming in and where they are in the journey. Make sure your distributor locator is your ally in those efforts.
Links to Informative Distributor Profile Pages
Even big wholesale transactions consist of humans doing business with other humans. Bearing that in mind, your global distributors each have a “personality” that can — and should — shine though to potential retailers, contractors, and other parties looking to procure building materials locally.
In addition, stats from Worldwide Business Research (WBR) show B2B buyers are up to 70% through their research before they even contact a sales rep, and around 90% of B2B buyers say that online content has a moderate to major effect on their decision to buy.
Your opportunity here? Show what makes each of your distributors unique with a locator that links out to helpful, info-rich distributor profiles. Simply by giving your prospects more details on the distributors in their area, right as they search, you’ll likely improve conversion rates and sales from journeys originating with your website.
The pages you link to can mention the distributors’ specialties, granular detail about inventory, corporate history, contact information for relevant sales reps, and much more. This can make all the difference for a savvy buyer who has choices, but wants more insight before making a decision.
Do this and you can easily set your brand apart from the competition — including even building product companies who are native to the region, yet won’t furnish as much helpful info for their buyers.
Bullseye Locations: The #1 Enterprise-Grade Distributor Locator Tool to Handle It All
Your exact niche, business model, and expansion goals are unique. However, as a global building product manufacturer, it’s a given that you’ll need an ironclad, sustainable network of distribution partners.
That means you’ll want to anchor your global distributor network with world-class location search tech that reliably drives demand generation and sales.
To get it right, go with a locator platform that makes your distributors discoverable by the right regional prospects, stays adaptable to local market trends and buying behavior, ensures a smooth user experience, and captures leads at scale. When it comes to all these functions, Bullseye Locations is in a class of its own.
Bullseye allows you to build professional, easy-to-use locator pages that give your overseas customers all the conveniences and details they need to choose the right distributor in their region:
- A dynamic, highly-customizable map
- Support for over 100 languages, including Spanish, French, Mandarin, and many more
- A powerful admin panel that lets you define regions by radius, territory (with local inclusions and exclusions), state, and country
- The ability to dynamically create distributor profile pages
- A robust lead capture mechanism that lets you follow up with prospects who submit inquiries
On top of all these advantages, Bullseye can partner with you to create the exact custom enterprise solution to meet your company’s unique needs and ambitions.
It’s time to do right by your global distributor network. Choose the one enterprise-grade locator software that’s proven effective in connecting your distributors to local customers and building your online sales engine abroad.
Schedule your Bullseye demo today to learn more!
