Working with dealer or distributor networks means you lose control and rely more heavily on network participation to bring in revenue. If your network is reliable and functions well, this relieves a workload from your shoulders. However, you might struggle to meet your sales goals if there are bottlenecks, miscommunication, and poor lead management.
Learn how to boost your dealer and distributor network participation with data and a multi-location management system.
Key Takeaways:
- You can improve your network participation by unifying your data in one centralized system
- Create a single source of data so all your locations can work with the same real-time information
- Avoid losing leads between networks by automatically tracking and distributing contacts between locations
Challenges with Network Participation
Working with multiple locations can be a challenge that leads to poor network participation. Here are three common network challenges multi-location businesses often face:
Poor Communication
Communication between you and your networks is how you identify issues and resolve them quickly. However, when there is poor communication, you won’t always realize the challenges they’re facing and why they aren’t reaching their sales goals.
About 97% of workers say poor communication impacts their daily efficiency.
Scattered Information
Poor dealer network participation is often due to limited data. While you may have a complete view of the consumers, your network dealers may only see part of that picture, which prevents them from taking advantage of all potential opportunities and reaching their customers with engaging and personalized marketing content.
In addition, there will be times your network collects data from its interactions that you never see. Therefore, you can’t adjust your business strategies according to that data.
Lost Leads
Does this sound familiar?
You invest thousands into generating quality leads. However, at some point between lead generation and when your network receives the leads, most of them seem to disappear.
You often have several different systems and communication channels when working with networks. This creates long and convoluted lead distribution processes.
In the end, your network never gets all the leads you sent their way, or the lead is cold by the time your network sees it because those leads go through so many hoops and hurdles.
5 Ways to Improve Your Network Participation
Collecting and managing your data across your franchise will vastly improve your network participation and alleviate most of your challenges. Here are five specific ways to use data in your multi-location business.
1. Understand Your Audience Segments
Data allows you to understand your audience, their behaviors, and their needs.
For example, it might tell you:
- Where they are
- Who they are
- How they contacted you in the past (Social media, email, customer support chat)
- What needs they expressed in the past
- What products have they already purchased
This information gives you a more comprehensive view of your customers, which allows your network to provide personalized sales pitches and offers exclusive to its audience segment.
For example, a construction equipment manufacturer will have a different strategy for selling through their network locations in cities than in rural areas as their customers will have vastly different challenges. Understanding the various challenges allows both networks to offer a unique message to their customers for the same products.
2. Unify Your Network Data Management
A data management system centralizes your data, so you have a single source of truth. Each network location sees the same information and receives real-time updates, improving communication.
In addition, centralizing your data improves the accuracy of information. For example, you don’t need to worry about errors when transferring customer data between separate databases for each network location.
When you can efficiently manage and use data, you are 58% more likely to surpass your revenue goals.
Source: Pipartners
3. Automatically Route Leads
Lead nurturing results in 50% more sales-ready leads while costing 33% less. Lead nurturing is taking time to qualify and build relationships with leads. To nurture leads effectively, you need a seamless lead distribution strategy.
Lead distribution moves leads from one stage to the next of the buyer’s journey. For example, when a lead initially fills in an online form, your lead management system can automatically add them to an email drip campaign. Then, after several interactions with the email campaign, the system qualifies that lead and routes them to the appropriate network location for further nurturing or closing.
Without an automated system that runs on data to perform these tasks in one place, you will work with longer wait times, delays, and the risk of losing leads because they aren’t transferred correctly.
4. Provide a Consistent Voice
A consistent voice across your network is more difficult when you’re spread across the country or the globe. When each distributor or dealer feels like an isolated experience, it can hurt the customer experience.
A consistent brand experience can increase your revenue by 33%.
You can use data to build a unified brand experience and seamless customer engagement by connecting all network locations under one system. This allows them to use the same message methods, consistent knowledge about the customer, and a unified brand message.
5. Measure Your Network ROI
The second biggest marketing challenge following lead generation is proving the ROI of your marketing efforts. The larger your company is, the more difficult it becomes to track the impact of your marketing activities and understand the total value of your investments.
However, this process becomes easier when you incorporate a lead-tracking system that collects and stores data from your marketing activities. You can follow leads and every interaction they had along their buyer’s journey to gather multichannel marketing results.
That data is what you use to develop an attribution model for assigning value to each activity for a more accurate view of how you spend your resources and what strategies are yielding the best results across your network.
Source: Venture Harbour
Tracking your performance not only helps you prove your overall ROI but also helps you understand the return from individual network locations. It can tell you which network locations are performing best and where the most significant challenges are so you can address them quickly and offer the network location the tools and resources it needs to grow into a top performer.
Build a High Performing Dealer Network
MXTR offers a solution for multi-location businesses with multiple dealers and distribution networks. Instead of working with separate and siloed data from each location using its own data management systems, you can connect your entire network with one all-in-one solution for lead management and distribution.
Schedule a demo to learn more about our marketing automation platform.
Feature Image: istockphoto
