Learning Without Scars
As a third-generation educator, it is easy to say that teaching and training are in the blood for Ron Slee. From his beginnings as a coach, through his time at McGill University, Ron developed a foundation for the work he does today. From working within dealerships, to operating a consulting company, creating a training business and running twenty groups, Ron has been directly involved in this Industry since 1969. Ron has been known as the industry expert for years, and has brought this expertise to bear through his training programs. Today, Ron provides specialized, job function based internet based subject specific classes, job function skills assessments, as well virtual seminars and webinars. These courses are designed for manufacturers and their dealers, as well as independent businesses in the construction equipment, light industrial, on-highway, engine, and agricultural industries through Learning Without Scars (www.LearningWithoutScars.com). This platform is a continuation of the work begun by Quest, Learning Centers which was established in 1996. This training is aimed at improving dealer parts and service operations through qualified people that are knowledgeable in using operational metrics and current market and operational best practice methods.
Learning Without Scars
Mastering Marketing in the Heavy Equipment Industry: Insights and Strategies
Unlock the secrets to mastering marketing in the heavy equipment industry with Stephanie Smith from Grind Marketing Collection and Mets Kramer from Visibility. Gain valuable insights into leveraging data to create powerful marketing strategies and understand why accurate data management is key to enhancing customer engagement. Stephanie and Mets reveal the often misunderstood aspects of marketing and the importance of blending internal knowledge with external expertise for optimal results.
Explore the nuances of targeting different age demographics and the necessity of personalized messaging. Stephanie shares how technology can help manage multiple marketing segments, ensuring that both younger and older audiences receive messages that resonate with them. Learn about the significance of setting clear, measurable goals and how data can be a critical tool in assessing the effectiveness of your strategies. Our discussion spans different regional market demands and stresses the importance of a cohesive, adaptable strategy.
Discover the power of customer segmentation and the 80-20 rule in market analysis as we discuss the right approach to dividing geographic territories and understanding customer contributions across various business categories. Learn how technology and data can support sales efforts and enhance sales reps' effectiveness through multiple touchpoints. Finally, hear about the evolving dynamics of marketing teams, the importance of mentoring, and the potential of machine learning and data analytics in tackling advanced audience strategy challenges. Don't miss out on this episode packed with practical insights and real-world examples!
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Aloha and welcome to another candid conversation. We're going to have an interesting time today because we have Stephanie Smith from the Grind Marketing Collection and Metz Kramer from Visibility, and this is the second free-flowing discussion that we're going to have as the trio. I've asked Stephanie and Metz to pick it up and go wherever the hell they want on two specific subjects One is marketing and the other is business systems. So with that as the introduction, hello Stephanie, hello Metz, hey Ron, you're on.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for the introduction and teeing us up here. Ron, You're on. Well, thanks for the introduction and TN us up here, Ron.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. You want to start with marketing?
Speaker 3:I'm happy to start wherever we see fit.
Speaker 2:We wanted to talk about bananas, I think.
Speaker 3:We wanted to talk about bananas, yeah, so the last time we were together we were talking about business systems and we were talking about ways to leverage data and business systems and understanding different ways that data can inspire your marketing activities. Bananas kind of came up right. We were talking about key metrics that we could leverage within the heavy equipment space to understand whether or not people were buying from us consistently or buying from other people, and so maybe we start there.
Speaker 1:Okay, and let me put a frame around it in a different way. One of my problems with both marketing and systems all aspects of the business is our data. We've had databases for as long as I've been around, right back to school in the 60s. We haven't managed those databases very well, so our data fields aren't particularly accurate. Marketing is everything, in my view, everything and anything that influences a customer.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:And I don't think in this space we do that very well. I'm sure Stephanie, you'll agree with that. And Mets, from a system side, with your dealers, marketing kind of scares people. Why do you suppose that? Am I right, Mets?
Speaker 2:I think marketing, first of all, is misunderstood, and that's one of the things that Stephanie does really well is understand what marketing truly is. That's one of the things that Stephanie does really well is understand what marketing truly is. That is understanding who your customers are and how one group of customers differs from another and what kind of products that group is interested in, and then how to message each one of those. I think that the data component of that is a critical piece. If you can't get the data or data whichever one is american um then it's really hard to do it.
Speaker 2:And the reason we brought up bananas at the beginning is because stephanie brought up that in a previous life. You know bananas was one of those data points that was a leading indicator of an, of a situation with their customer, and, and so I think data needs to be accessible and we've talked about this a bunch of times. Like the data that you have, you need to. The dealers need to own, they need to understand it, they need to access it so that they can really work with their marketing people, in-house or not, to understand what that data means to them, because it is specific. There's no generic model for equipment or for a dealer. Everyone has a slight variance in geography and territory and product line, so marketing is specific.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree with you. The other thing that that ties into is a belief that I have that the dealership is involved in supporting customers for parts, for service, for rental, for machines and all the categories they're in. In my view, I wouldn't even have marketing be part of a dealership structure. I'd have that be a purchased, a specialized purchase, and the reason I say that is that I've become much more of the mind that we have to focus on best practices. We have to focus on what we are supposed to be good at, and if we aren't one of the best practice providers, then we need to outsource it.
Speaker 1:And when we outsource it, I'm looking for partners, I'm not looking to build it myself, which is the old software approach to life. So you know, I call it three Ps. You can either partner with people, or you buy them, you purchase them, or finally you produce them, and I don't want anybody to produce them. So, stephanie, from your side at this juncture, from my perspective, you're one of two or three best practice providers of marketing services to this industry that opens. I think the dealers are going to resist the hell out of that. They want to control it, especially the sales guys. Am I right, wrong or sort of what.
Speaker 3:I think people are starting to become more and more open to marketing as it becomes more prevalent in our industry. Going back to something that Matt said, it's misunderstood. People have their own definition of it. We've talked a lot about it. Right to have somebody on the inside that understands marketing enough to know that they need outside support and to know that they need help. And it's always good to have different people that can challenge you in different ways to think differently. So that's why having both having somebody on the inside that understands the company needs and the goals and objectives, to be able to communicate that to the outside party, is helpful. There is going to be resistance.
Speaker 3:People do want to own it and control it, but sometimes well, not sometimes. You know there's an old saying right the customer is always right the customer. Depending on how you want to interface with them. You need to make sure that they are a top priority in terms of how they are influencing your business. And in today's landscape, the customers want it to be easy and they want it to be convenient. And where there's a huge opportunity for our industry right now to leverage both marketing and data and technical systems is to make sure that you're set up appropriately to where you can trigger the sales team to know what's going on with customers, or you can trigger the customer based off of certain service needs or parts needs no different than cars right, mercedes or Toyota. Any of those guys will send you a notification that it's time for an oil change. We should be doing that all the time in our industry because it makes it convenient and it makes it easy for the customer.
Speaker 1:You said something really critical. There needs to be somebody in the business you're servicing who is the receptor, depository of everything from you to them and vice versa, who is respected and known within the company but almost agnostic. It should not be a part of any department.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 2:I would challenge it to some degree. I mean, I came in at Tormund and our VP of sales was also, I think, vp of marketing and I think if your head of sales, regardless of title, doesn't really understand what marketing is, if that person looks at marketing and says that's hats and t-shirts is, if that person looks at marketing and says that's hats and t-shirts, then you have a sales strategy that isn't based on marketing. If your marketing head of marketing can't, or head of sales can't call in and say look, I really need to understand my market.
Speaker 1:This might not fit and, stephanie, you'll be the judge. I don't believe that the person responsible for selling equipment should be responsible for anything other than selling equipment. Similarly, service or parts or rentals. They have to execute the strategy that the company comes up with that they're a party to but they're not in control of. Does that make sense to you, stephanie?
Speaker 3:It makes sense, but I think it depends on how the company is structured, our business perspective and this is something that I share with people regularly. If the sales leader is not at the table when the grind comes to pitch a proposal, then that's automatically not a good fit for us as a marketing organization, because that, to me, says that the sales team is not bought into what the marketing team is going to be doing and there's not going to be collaboration and communication, and in today's landscape you have to have both.
Speaker 1:I agree with you 100%, and what I'm leading to is the way the companies are structured today is a function of how they've operated for the last 50 to 100 years.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:With the arrival of the internet operated for the last 50 to 100 years. Absolutely. With the arrival of the internet, that has fundamentally changed, but this industry hasn't. To wit, if you find a really best practices dealer, you might have 10 to 15 percent of the parts transactions going via the internet, probably less than 5% paying online, and these are fundamental things. So maybe I go too far in expectation that we can transition these guys to where they should be for tomorrow as opposed to where they are from yesterday. And I agree with you, stephanie if the guys whose self-image and perception is that they are, they've got to be at the table, and one of the challenges I think you have is to get across to them that they aren't.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that too harsh?
Speaker 3:No, it's not. I mean, that's honestly why the grind was formed right we want to help people understand that there's a better way to do things. You just said it, Ron in order to be around tomorrow, you have to embrace this digital transformation that's taking shape and, let's be honest, the digital transformation that we're talking about for the heavy equipment industry looks a lot different than what other industries looks like, because other industries have already done this. So we can we can learn from our peers and other industries to make that a little bit more achievable and attainable, and and I guess that's where I'm also saying that I've we've been fortunate at the grind to have clients that are forward thinking enough to know that they have to have those folks at the table, and if they don't, they're, they're just not ready, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's, that's true, and you're right, you're, you're dealing with you're. You're also dealing with leading edge businesses, because you're dealing with the forward thinking people and those. I'm going to split them up in age demographics, which is maybe nasty, but I'm going to say 40, 45 and down, much more receptive than 45, 50 and up. The older folks are protecting the old way because they know how to do it and they're comfortable with that and they don't really understand the new way. And the younger guys are impatient because they see some of the things. You know, we do these things personally now, but we don't professionally, and that's kind of nuts.
Speaker 2:Oh my god, why does everyone have to be exclusive about this like?
Speaker 3:it's so funny, even in our language.
Speaker 2:You know, like, why be exclusive about one way or the other? The young guys want it this way, the old guys want it this way. And isn't this exactly the point of marketing? And someone like stephanie coming in and saying, like, look, you have this percentage of your customer base that, based on the information we've collected, fits the model of the young guys. And then you've got this percentage that fits the model the old guys and marketing really does, supported by data coming from your system, is, say, this is the message we're going to send to the old guys and we're going to use these channels and these methods and this message and this is the message we're going to send to the new guys.
Speaker 1:Is that how you go after it, Stephanie? Is that exactly?
Speaker 3:Absolutely, because every so, today, today's customer, regardless of whether they're in heavy equipment, whether they're buying a machine, or they're buying bananas or they're buying whatever, they want a very personalized message. They want a very personalized experience, because there is so much noise surrounding them that they don't get that personalized attention. So people are craving that right now, and we are literally running campaigns right now that have anywhere from five segments to 15 segments all at the exact same time, with different messaging strategies and different workflows, to meet the needs of those clients in real time. And it doesn't take as much time as what people think, because we're leveraging technology to help us do that.
Speaker 1:So in that case I have a five-store operation. Do you have five different marketing plans?
Speaker 3:You have one parent because you're going to roll up to a corporate entity in some regards. So you have one parent because you're going to roll up to a corporate entity in some regards. So you have one parent. Umbrella plan that incorporates plans for each of the branches, yes, and then, within each of those branches, you're also leveraging the know-how of each of the sales reps, because each of those territories are going to look a little bit different, especially because of the complexities within their market. So there's a lot of listening that has to take place from a marketing perspective, to not only understand the customer, but to understand the demographics but also the landscape in which they're playing, so that you can build a comprehensive plan from the top to the bottom, from the bottom to the top and outward.
Speaker 1:Let me change the word plan you mentioned. We got to have a corporate plan, a central plan, an umbrella. I'm going to call that a strategy. So does that mean that you have a strategy for each of the operating departments within Part-service sales rentals?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have to.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. I'm with you and Mets, does that fit your? Can we do both?
Speaker 2:approach Absolutely. That's the power of having true access to your data and understanding your customer base. You know, when I did the parts and service thing across Canada, I had very different markets. You know you had here in the Hamilton area lots of scrap metal people, lots of, you know, long hour operations and very sensitive to being able to load trains and stuff when it happened. If you want to build, you know a marketing strategy that's across the country, it won't fit in Hamilton. They need you to be there instantly and their messaging needs to be we're here to support you.
Speaker 2:Out in BC, in the forestry, you know, where travel time is super expensive, your messaging needs to be we have availability, we, you know we're around to get the parts you need, but they're servicing themselves Like we're here to support you servicing yourself. Two different markets, two different messages. Because that's what fits in the in the data gives that away. Like if you look at your service data and say and it says you know we don't service anyone regularly that's more than 200 kilometers or miles away, because the travel charges get stupid, whereas if we're close by we do. Well, there you go. The data says my message to the people close by should be. We're here to service you, the people who are far away. The message should be come and get it, we have it ready for you.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say, or the data also suggests that, hey, there's enough people over here that are 200 miles away. We need another branch there because it's not sufficient for us to keep charging these travel charges.
Speaker 1:So let me come back up. We've got this strategy plan, an umbrella of quote executives or leaders that make that decision decide. So we have this strategy. What's the goal?
Speaker 3:What's the goal of having the strategy?
Speaker 1:A strategy is always aimed at a goal, a purpose.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:What is it?
Speaker 3:It depends on what the organization wants, right? So you either have revenue goals or you have market share goals.
Speaker 1:Okay, so from a marketing perspective, how are you going to measure the effectiveness of the strategy? In other words, what's the goal that I'm going to measure myself against?
Speaker 3:So that man, you're tapping right into my sweet spot right now.
Speaker 1:So I try.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah. Well, this, this is where this gets fun, right, and this is where you really integrate technology, right. So, say you, it's a revenue goal, right. And you decided that part of supporting your revenue goal is you need to sell 200 more machines this year than you did last year, and you need to be able to double down on your marketing strategies throughout the year, meaning you need to understand how they're performing, right. And so if you're using Google ads, you're using Facebook ads or you're using any type of machinery, trader or third party, you want to be able to measure that performance. Well, the way you do that is you use technology, you put some digital trackers in place and you relate that back into your CRM system or your business system to help track the data and, at any given point in time, you know where that machine was actually sold from. And so you can say oh, my Google ad strategy is suffering right now because we're not selling as many machines this year versus last year.
Speaker 3:In Google ads, what are we missing? You go in, you tweak the marketing dollar amount or you look and you say, holy cow, things are going gangbusters on Facebook. I really need to double down on that strategy and maybe pull away from some of my third parties, and so that gives you the ability. You build a plan, but then you also have to build in flexibility to help meet that plan and so, along the way, this is why you need people who understand how to measure the performance of all of this, so that you can double down on certain strategies, you can adjust certain strategies, or now you're implementing a new strategy because you're like wow, google ads isn't working, facebook ads isn't working. What about a personalized email strategy? Is there a way for us to really capture the market that way?
Speaker 1:Okay, so I think everything you just said ties to a macro level. So I sell 100 units, I want to sell another 50. Where's the micro level? What's the level at which we want to have very specific, measurable performance goals?
Speaker 3:You can do that even in the parts department.
Speaker 1:You can do it everywhere, but what's the lowest common denominator? I'm going to give you a goal to fit the company goal. Who are you? What's the job you have? That's what I'm trying to get to.
Speaker 3:Sure, everybody within the organization needs to have KPIs and they roll up into the bigger picture.
Speaker 1:Specific to them.
Speaker 3:And specific to what their output is going to be within the organization.
Speaker 1:I'm with you. So, from a marketing perspective, is it true to say that you're going to assign customers to people, individuals?
Speaker 3:to assign customers to people, individuals. Well, I mean, that's a good question. You assign key accounts and based off of this is my philosophy. Okay, it hasn't necessarily not everybody's really embraced it, but I think the best way to do that in terms of people and to be able to effectively manage it especially in today's business landscape, because people are hard to come by in dealerships is you assign key accounts to certain reps and then you kind of look at it in terms of what are your tiers A, b, c or D in terms of customer size and what meets your market A, b, c or D in terms of customer size and what meets your market and then from there, you either staff based off of an outside sales rep, an inside sales rep, and then marketing can compound all of that by being the support, because it depends on what the strategy is. If you're leveraging a boots on the ground strategy solely, you're going to need to completely rely on people. If you're leveraging a hybrid mix, that is, sales and marketing, you don't need as many people.
Speaker 1:So let me circle around. I agree with you. I want to have a specific goal for every equipment salesman. So you mentioned key accounts. Can you give me a definition of what the key account is?
Speaker 3:Key accounts are typically the largest buyers within a certain market.
Speaker 1:What percentage of the sales should the key accounts cover? Ballpark spitball.
Speaker 3:Well, this is where this gets a little. Everybody's got their own definition of this.
Speaker 1:This is where you could embrace the 80-20 rule, but sometimes that doesn't necessarily apply and that goes back to what Metz was thinking about relative to specific markets, specific areas. What I try and do and everybody has this different idea I'm going to segment. I'm going to segment, I'm going to stratify every, every geographic territory. I'm going to call it a county, just for lack of another term. I hate using counties, but let's use that as as a basis. In that county I have a hundred customers and I'm going to know what percentage of the total every single one of those customers owns, for all four categories of my business parts, service, sales and rentals and I'm sure this is the way that Metz did it in his youth and inexperience. That's yesterday, I understand. For me it's yesterday too, I understand. For me it's yesterday too. And the trick with this, stephanie, is you're going to run into all kinds of people who have all kinds of different ideas.
Speaker 1:That 80-20 rule has been around since the beginning of time. And if we say that Metz's dealership, where he was doing it across the country, probably had 100,000 customers, so the 80-20 rule, if I look just at number of customers, I'm going to be dealing with 20,000 customers, 10 provinces, 2,000 customers each. That's easy, each. I'm going to say, just arbitrarily, I'm going to give every salesman 100 customers, so now I've got 10 salesmen in each of these categories. Every one of those salesmen, then, is going to have a micro goal, objective, kpi, whatever terminology we want to use that I'm going to monitor and manage True.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Okay, frequency of review should be what?
Speaker 3:Hey, I would say daily. But Mets don't look at it, I'm with you 100%.
Speaker 1:So we need to have early warning system. Again, we're looking at technology here. We have data coming out the wazoo, but we don't use it.
Speaker 3:Well, that's where the triggers help. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that true, Mets?
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so my first presentation at AED was called a granular data-driven approach to equipment SIS and it came from one of my earliest interactions with the CIO, who mentored me a little bit, and we had a really good database of all of the customer's equipment better than most people have, and certainly not enough dealers spend time collecting this but it really gives you this information on all kinds of makes and models that your customers own. That is valuable information. Too many dealers spend too much time only thinking about what they've sold a customer but not looking into the customer's fleet to understand what the opportunity is and thereby actually trying to predict when those machines need to be replaced so that they're using that as triggers for sales activity. I'm going to go back to the 80-20 thing because it's been sitting here. You often talk about the shrinking amount of market that parts people, that the parts department's getting.
Speaker 1:Number of customers competing in the market. Number of dealers competing in the market. All brands.
Speaker 2:I think we used to have sort of what do you call that? A positive feedback loop where you know we say 80% of the business comes from 20% of the customers because the model of how we interact with those customers is based on our limit to only hit 20% of the market of the customers and therefore we on 80% of our business coming from the 20% of people, 20% of customers we can touch by a salesman in a truck. Now we can touch, you know that 60% of customers who rove around from dealer to brand to brand and they want an easier exchange with their dealer. How many small customers have told big dealers you never come and talk to me. Why do I not do more business?
Speaker 2:Your sales rep's always over there with that big contractor. He's never here. That's why I don't do business with you. But now, if you give that customer who doesn't spend money with you a channel to not have to worry about a sales rep and come buy something from you directly through some channel that they prefer anyway, now you've got that business. And that is like the opposite of that confirmation bias that says like, oh, we get 80% of our business from the sales guys who drive around in trucks.
Speaker 1:Stephanie, you wanted to intervene there.
Speaker 3:So I'll put this stat out there, right Like. The thing that is, uh, most interesting right now for me is the fact that 17 years ago, it took four impressions or or four advertisements to convert somebody to sale. In today's noisy world, it takes anywhere from 17 to 20 touch points. Now, if you think about a guy driving around in a truck, how many times is he actually able to touch those 100 customers that you just assigned him, Ron, by himself, every single day? I mean, that has to happen consistently and it's not going to.
Speaker 3:When you incorporate technology and data and marketing, you can now help support. This doesn't do anything in terms of doing away with sales guys, but you now support the sales reps in market by providing those opportunities for additional touch points, whether it be through social media, through email marketing, through your website, through video, through whatever channel you choose, you're now helping that sales rep that when he does finally show up on that job site, it's not a cold call. People know who you are and they understand what you have to represent. But I want to also go back to something that Matt was just talking about in terms of data collection, right Like. I think one of the barriers right now is. People think about collecting data as being this additional thing that is going to be very time consuming, and it's not. When you put the right tools in place, it becomes an automated thing that the data is working behind the scenes for you to help you better run your business. You just have to access the data.
Speaker 1:Well, it leads to two or three things. People don't understand data analytics, which is what you're talking about. The other thing that I want to go back to is what Metz was saying 80-20. That's kind of a diminished expectation, isn't it? Yeah, so it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We've had 80-20. That's fine, we're going to do that. We're growing Fantastic, but you've left a huge slug of the market To your point, metz, you never come to me, you're always over with the big guy. Well, you take Caterpillar and Deere out of the market and you've taken about 80% of the machine sales. So everybody's dealing with a much smaller thing, and yet none of the people that are in the 20 call on the Caterpillar or John Deere machine, which is ludicrous.
Speaker 1:I'm selling life insurance. Am I going to only sell life insurance to young people or am I going to go to old people too? Truly, we are so mired in diminished expectations is what I call it. But it's all historical, fundamentally altered change that A small group of people has radically reformed how we do marketing and market coverage. But it's such a small group it's almost embarrassing. That's where I want, that's my point at the beginning of wanting to separate like chief technology officer, chief information officer, chief security officer All of these things are specialty services or issues in our business that we haven't dealt with, and I think that's part of the dilemma that we all have.
Speaker 1:If I was in the consulting world today like I was 50 years ago, I'd have to reconfigure everything I did to the market, because the market is totally different today and to your bets of younger. Older. We can do both at the same time, and what ends up happening is the salesman, and we all know this. The salesman has this trap line he's comfortable with you. Give him $150, $120, I don't care what you give him. He's going to go to the same two or three people all the time, and I hate that. And that's the face-to-face guy. So we've got the telephone guy, we've got the internet guy, we've got all manner of channels, yep, but we're conditioned in the industry to be face-to-face channels, not even telephone channels. Yeah, which is like a self-selecting thing, right exactly when I come by.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah. Well, your crappiest customers don't want to see your face. That's why they're crappy customers. They're not bad people or bad business opportunities. They just want to deal a different way.
Speaker 1:So find them a channel.
Speaker 3:I always say like a company, sorry but people are also busy, right, like so I had this conversation the other day, right, if you, if you are running a excavation company and somebody called out you're, you're going to be in the cab of an excavator, right? And so eight to five, if you're an owner operator, you don't have the capacity to really entertain people. And if people show up on your job site and they don't have something to actually like solve a problem for you, some type of solution, you are completely frustrated because now your time has just been wasted. Where is if you provide these channels? Let's just go back to the notion everybody is shopping all the time. Because everybody is. You have to show up where people are at and you have to provide means for them to do business with you when they're ready, and that is after hours a lot of times in our business, in our industry, because of the complexities of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Best Buy is kind of a good example. We always talk about Amazon, right, and their sort of dominance and how they've mastered the people who want to buy online, but if you look at someone like Best Buy, you know they have two very distinct channels. They have very strong online sales that ships to you or that you can pick up at the store, or you can go into the store and see the thing you're going to buy, and it satisfies how people want to interact with them in multiple ways. And dealers also need to do this mental exercise every once in a while. Like if the three of us were going to start a new dealership, we'd grab a bunch of pizzas on a Saturday morning and we would start thinking okay, who are the customers, what are they like? What differentiates them? What are they looking for? How are we going to communicate with each of those groups? Because we're desperate, as a new company, to try and get them all right.
Speaker 2:And instead too many dealers like well, this model works, and they get positive confirmation of that back, but they don't take the time to say okay, if we were starting from scratch and we knew exactly everything we know about our customers and what they want and what they have, how would we build a new dealership? And then from that mental exercise you get all the areas you're missing.
Speaker 1:The interesting thing that it gets into. I call those things customer service delivery systems. The Best Buy is a perfect example where we've got customers walk in because they want to touch it, feel it, see it. We've got other customers that do their shopping online, like Stephanie's saying, at two o'clock in the morning they figure out which products they want to get to and then they interact with two or three vendors on the internet and then they place the order on the internet. And that's three different delivery systems.
Speaker 1:In my view, that requires three different structures behind it and skill sets behind it. So, stephanie's point we're going into a period where employee skills, people skills, are going to be seriously challenged. We do not have enough coming out of schools that fit today's workforce period. End of story.
Speaker 1:How we get them is going to be interesting, because what Stephanie's talking about with direct marketing, with email marketing, with social marketing, with social media, all this stuff that doesn't require a lot of boots, whether it's on the ground or in the air. It requires some boots that are really eggheads. They're nerds, they know what the hell, they're smart, they can think strategically, they're geometric thinkers and they have to have an audience that accepts them, understands them, to be able to come to a conclusion about them, and that's part of what I was saying at the beginning. I don't think we've got that today, when I was consulting Stephanie one of the reasons that I said I believe, made me successful I would go in and do an operations review of a business. You go in and do a marketing review of a business. I would leave them a report, cost benefit analysis, all this stuff, and I'd go away.
Speaker 3:You can't.
Speaker 1:Well, after a couple of three years, I you know, I followed back. Nothing happened, nothing happened. So I got to the point of okay, here's the report, who's going to drive this for you? And they look around at each other and I finally said, well, you want me to do it? So what, in effect, they did was outsource the change agent and then, I would you know, turn the house upside down, put it back on the ground everybody know, and move away.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's almost how we need to approach this. Today, we got a delivery system that your traditional boots on the ground. You're comfortable with that. That's fantastic. We'll support you. We'll give you better data and help you make that better. However, yeah, here's the rest of the story, and we'll do that for you Because I don't think they can do it for themselves In time. I agree and that would be part of Stephanie's job to transition her business, because she's not going to have enough people to be able to get this done. So two, three, five years from now, they need to be able to stand on their own so she can pick up some others along the way.
Speaker 3:So that's organically how things have happened for the grind, intentionally or unintentionally, we've come in to be people's interim marketing departments, whether they have a team of one or they have a team of none, or they have a team of many. Um, part of what has become our sweet spot recently is is coming in and mentoring the people who are currently sitting in the seats. Um, and I mean we we get a lot of reward out of that. Um, but that also helps to uh, foster this mindset for the future. Right Is making disciples out of disciples. In a sense, you have to be able to teach people, right, because if not, then there's too much change that's going on in the world for people to try to do it all themselves right now, and that's why key partners who can come in and understand your business and help you build business solutions to meet your specific business needs are so important right now. If not, people won't do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the things that we did years ago and I haven't seen it for a while we would have a group of people come in in the summer, one year away from graduation either undergrad or master's and of course they're all young, and in Hewitt's case in Quebec and in Finning's case in British Columbia, I was the youngest manager, so I was the guy that drove those people. So they'd come in and we're trying to find out for them, to find out if they feel comfortable with us and if we could feel comfortable with them. The first month I think Metz has heard this story the first month they put them in the warehouse and in the first month we lost between a third and a half of them because they didn't want to work that hard, kind of like I want to be in the corner office now Still a problem, I agree. And so you know, at the end of the summer, four months later, I've got, you know, a group of people and we'd offer them a job and then we put them.
Speaker 1:Those that took the job after graduation came in and we had a career path where they started with a small territory equipment sales and it didn't really matter whether they're any good or not we weren't going to, you know. But when I got there in 78, every single branch manager, every single sales manager, every single parts manager, every single service manager, everybody in administration, had come into the company that way. That culture is unbelievably powerful. That's what we need to transition to today for marketing, isn't it?
Speaker 3:I mean I'm kind of biased towards marketing, but I think in business operations in general you have to in order to especially if we're trying to attract new people into the industry and younger people there has to be a growth plan for people to want to actually stay in the industry.
Speaker 1:See, and on the technician side, mince, the number of technical schools that are available for people is about a half of what it was in 1990. Yeah, and we have a much greater need for technical skills today. With technology and everything else that floats with it Parts, we can almost take somebody out of high school like they do a Canadian tire, and they become professional very quickly because they're agile, they're flexible, they're open-minded. Equipment salesman, that's another kind of fabrication, but equipment salesman, that's another kind of fabrication. Does an equipment salesman have to be this big, macho guy with big machines?
Speaker 3:Or does he just have to be a good peddler? I think they have to have great people skills and they can be a girl. Oh, I agree with you. I know they can.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, but take it another way. Ron's like oops, this is cute. I did a marketing study in the Pacific Northwest for a pretty big dealer and I'm calling around to all kinds of customers and employees. I've got two interesting comments. One was a woman who owned a construction business comments. One was a woman who owned a construction business and she was ticked at the Napa girl that arrived in her hooter, shorts and tank top and everybody on the shop floor stopped work to go see who she was.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The one that shocked me the most, however, was the wife of a customer who complained about the sales woman being with her husband in the bar after dinner. I had never anticipated that, so we've got all kinds of interesting things. I want women because they to me. They tend to be a hell of a lot more analytical, much more much more direct as manager, less emotional than men. So I like the response that I get from. There's no defensiveness. Here's the facts. Baby, let's go.
Speaker 3:Well, I think that they're good at nurturing too, and they're not going to.
Speaker 3:so, going back to something you said earlier, ron, sorry, I don't have a lot of experience in this, but I think that if you've been a salesperson in the industry for a large amount of time, you get comfortable in the fact that, oh, he's a cat guy, so he's only going to buy cat and he's never going to buy anything else, so I'm just going to let leave him be right. Or, oh, he's just a tire kicker, so I'm not going to invest. He came in via an internet lead and I haven't had good experience with that, so I'm just going to let that be where. If you and it doesn't have to be a girl, but I do think that girls will will typically nurture, and maybe they nurture a little bit too long. But I think that sometimes they can convince people, uh, of the thing that they need versus the thing they thought they needed, of the thing that they need versus the thing they thought they needed, and they tend to have bigger outcomes within the transaction.
Speaker 1:So what you're opening up there is we have to have people in the industry that are better coaches.
Speaker 3:I think we have to have people in the industry that actually care about what the customer's needs are. That you know. Yes, you want to sell them, we'll just stick with excavators. Yes, you want to sell them an excavator. But going back to Metz's earlier point, if you've done your homework, you know that not only do they need an excavator, but they need a wheel loader.
Speaker 3:They also need an articulated truck, and maybe it's not on this job site, but they need a material handler and they need a dump truck and they needed this and they needed that. So if you spend a little bit of time talking with them, maybe they came to you originally because they needed an excavator. But if you spend time actually understanding what their business needs are and just being curious, like leaning into the conversation and saying, hey, what do you got going on on this job site, this is actually pretty interesting. They want to talk, they want to tell you what's going on, and then you listen and then you say, oh man, they've got five other job sites that they don't just need this excavator.
Speaker 1:Going back to your point that everybody says it's a lot of work to collect data. It isn't. We've got most of the data. One of the things that and Metz, I don't know if you ever did this, but one of the things that happens is every week or month, the municipalities, the counties, et cetera will list which contracts are out, who got them, what's the goals, how much money, all the rest of that stuff. And we actually did forecasting based on the contract value on the parts and service side of things.
Speaker 1:And the other thing that I did a long time ago was if you were an equipment salesman, you got about half of your commission from sales of our brand. You got half of your commission in taking our brand and putting in to replace a competitive brand. In other words, if you didn't get after the other stuff, you weren't going to live very well. Yeah, I think this is such a critical element of our business for the next God knows how long. But clearly Stephanie's on the right path and the way that she's kind of evolving, the way it does, looking at the customer and being their marketing coach, transferring skills, doing for them, I think that's wonderful and we need more Stephanies, although I don't want her to have people competing with her. You know, it's really interesting.
Speaker 2:But I think one of the things that Stephanie does really well is bring real-time understanding of information.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And we started with bananas, and bananas was a trigger. On that. You were losing a customer because banana sales were down to that customer. And this stuff is more real time and it's more accessible of all these data points so that you can start asking questions, so that you can start combining information from one part of the dealership to another to create a complete picture of a particular market segment and then turn that into action. Right, when banana sales go down, then that triggers in CRM for that sales rep to go talk and find out what's going on. Or if sales of parts start going down on a customer, you start a drip campaign automatically to start talking to that customer reminding them that you know parts have a benefit when they come from the dealer versus when you're buying them on Amazon.
Speaker 2:You know this stuff has to be real time. We sometimes talk about email campaigning as if it's just this thing that goes out and then something will come back and then we'll deal with it when you know, when we have time. I mean an email lead that comes back off of a. An email campaign is good for, like some people will say, an hour, probably less than a day, you know. And so if you're. If your team isn't set up to get that information real time and then turn that into action real time, then all of that work won't get you anything and you're going to get the opposite. Confirmation bias, like email marketing, doesn't work because everyone we call when we finally dig out some numbers says it's too late. I bought something else, you know there's almost a different term.
Speaker 1:It's too late, I bought something else. There's almost a different term. I don't know that. I would want to call that email marketing as much as I might want to call it email sales, because the marketing aspect of email, a lot of that's going to be just name recognition and visibility, which is what the Google SEOs do Doesn't sell necessarily other than my name recognitions out there.
Speaker 3:I think it's also a trigger, though I agree, I agree. In today's world there's so much communication that should be happening, that's not happening, and when you have the right systems in place.
Speaker 3:It ensures that communication is taking place, whether it be from the CTO to the sales rep that hey, there's this situation that might be going on. At least the sales rep's aware he needs to be aware because he's in market every day or the information is being trickled down to the customer. The communication has to happen and that tends to be a significant breakdown along the way.
Speaker 1:I think that's a nice segue to what Metz was leading to the data and the data analytics and how we deal with those from a system perspective, not necessarily from the marketing perspective the gathering and reporting and triggers, et cetera. Maybe that's what we should do in the next piece of this discussion. From a marketing point of view, I think what I heard you say, stephanie, and Metz, is there. We have data. The dealers at the moment have not been able to understand what to do with that data. They are differing opinions as to what marketing is.
Speaker 1:You come with a more holistic and macro view of marketing that you're able to communicate to the dealers the benefit of, and then your evolution to being a mentor, a coach. To have the skills inside the dealership is a gentle way of getting us there. But we still got a long way to go. And to Matt's point, we have disparate audiences in the dealer, much more granular audiences outside the dealer, and we haven't got a plan nor a strategy on how to cover our market other than the traditional sense. Am I summarizing this thing properly?
Speaker 2:Certainly that last point, I think, is still very relevant yeah.
Speaker 1:I agree, I agree. So let's take a little break on this and we'll pick up on the other side and get much more into the machine learning and data analytics. So thank you both. I will see you shortly and thank everybody who's listening. We hope to have you continue this discussion with us in the near future. Mahalo.
