Improving sales in a dealership by SNA

Background

Clients:  Selling trucks and buses is not as trivial than selling a cars. The sellers deal with high experienced customers, who knows deeply the products and their needs for an exactly area of activity they are going to perform on. The seller acts more as a consultant, partner, than a regular seller.

Each sell has it own nature and attributes, e.g. client performing on the mining field, has a totally different need than a client performing in agricultural area, who has other needs than a client working for logistic chains. Those are completely different niches of clients.

Sellers: Each seller has his own network of clients, which he is usually in contact, visiting constantly. Performing in specific areas, provides them specific know-how, about how to treat that niche, best way to deal and do business with them, specific knowledge of the product to support specific client’s needs. And most important, this previous experience allows those sellers to be welcomed on some niches environment.

Objective

- Improve sales power by a deep understanding of the client’s needs, company structure and field of performance, directing the right sellers, to such specific customers depending on previous experience and know how.

- Improving training of new sellers.

- Do not depend on specific sellers for future sells.

Measures and research

What we would like to measure here is, what kind of clients does one seller spend most of his time with and to what kind is he more successful with. To measure his relations (network) and specific know-how.

For that a research, questions  would be made focusing on these topics:

-To which company have you sold recently and who are the employees you have contacted inside the corporation (name and actuation field)

-Performance area of your clients on the last 10 sells?

-Which kind of client does you better correlates with?

Results

With the results we will be able:

- Professional network of the sellers

- To know with which customers the seller has more intimacy;

- Professional know-how of sellers;

- To map some customers hierarchy and know who are the decision makers;

- To discover persons that provides a “way-in” in customer’s companies.

Conclusion

By recognize a seller know-how, it is easier to train new sellers according with the company’s needs. If we need a new seller to perform at the agricultural sector, we put him together in visits with an experienced seller on that sector (as sellers usually visits in pars or teams). When any client comes to the company we know which seller to “use” with him, due to sector knowledge.

By finding out with who the seller did business with, we may be able to find out about the customer’s hierarchy, so we know the door in to that client in future sells, even if our seller is no longer working for us. Gives the dealership more flexibility by not depending on single sellers.

We would be able to set up cross-selling teams, with multi know how and experienced professionals to specific situations.