Sales tips: 3 ways to ensure your next sales stop is a success

There are more than 5,000 mobile distributors and more than 200,000 garages and 950,000 automotive service technicians across the United States. Clearly, it’s a very disproportionate number. Mobile distributors have never felt so much mounting pressure to ensure they’re profitable while working overtime to meet the needs of their growing book of customers. Even the savviest jobbers are finding themselves with less time to be a valued partner and are spending more time chasing down payments, managing issues and taking regular daily orders. The following tips will remind even the most experienced mobile distributors how to be successful when making their next sales stop.

 1) Be yourself and reinforce the importance of having solid relationships with your customers. It seems elementary, but know your strengths and weaknesses, and work hard at overcoming your weaknesses. When it comes to relationships, protect those connections and make sure you don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Learn as much as you can about your customer to help build a strong foundation for your relationship.

 2) Create an experience and put something in their hands. It’s convenient and easy to provide customers with magazines and literature, but don’t expect the promotional material to sell your products—it isn’t compelling enough to complete the transaction. Instead, do more by focusing on less. Pick a hero product or new item to demo and lead with it. Make sure you put product in their hands so they can touch and feel it and see it in action. For instance, our sales team has a GEARWRENCH handle on one end of a screwdriver and a competitor’s handle on the other so the customer can see and feel the difference—it makes a powerful statement. Jobbers can either come up with a demo on their own or lean on their wholesaler or manufacturer to provide one.

 3) Work with your wholesale and manufacturer partners to understand the brand and products from a 10,000-foot view and how you fit into the bigger picture. Take time to get to know the product strategy and brand of the line you’re selling. For brands that are sold into other channels, such as retail and ecommerce, partner with your suppliers to understand the channel segmentation strategy at a product level. Work with these partners to understand their projects, promotions and campaigns recommended to grow awareness of a line you stock and sell every day. For further success, where possible, look for opportunities to tie your promotions into their national campaigns.