The art of scalable dealer management

This article was written by Jelmer Reitsma from Elfsquad (Marketeer)

You need to be able to manage and expand your dealers through an online tool, which also connects them to production. Meaning, you want to send your dealers on their way with a validated sales model. Using your salespeople’s and engineers’ technical knowledge. Meaning they can effectively sell your products. And that they have done a large portion of your work preparation (pre-production), through use of CPQ software. Quotations with a tight design and bills of materials are automatically generated after all.

And even if you do not employ dealers (yet), this article can still be worth a read for you. As it is impossible to scale geographically without distribution of your products. You will find out how easy to manage this actually is. And not only your benefits will become clear, but also your dealers’, as they gain a great advantage when you are able to offer them a cloud- and web based quotation tool.

The importance of good dealer network management

If your network contains multiple dealers, you want to be able to shift between them quickly. Additionally, you want a good overview of all of their prestations. With the push of a button, you want to be able to see all of the rolled-out quotations. Allowing you to filter, analyze, and get to conclusions. 

For instance, it can be very interesting to see what the conversion percentages are for different dealers and quotations. Allowing you to strive for higher conversion percentages and higher quotation values. Eventually, this will boost both your and your dealers’ revenue.

Next to these insights, you also want to be able to easily grant- or take rights from dealers. As every dealer utilizes different margins, purchase prices, and rights for the sale of your product package. When all of this information floats around between you and your dealers there is little room for analyzing, let alone optimizing, which is a vital part of dealer management.

It is clear that all of your information should be available in one online tool. Insight, management, analysis, higher conversion percentages and -values, and shorter runtimes. But your dealers can gain the same advantages when they, too, make use of the same configuration tool that you use to manage them.

A personal environment for every dealer

When you grant the same configuration tool to all of your dealers, they enjoy the same advantages of cloud-based CPQ software as you do. They are able to configure your products in a visual environment. They know exactly which product lines they can- and cannot sell. Back-and-forth contact between dealers, salespeople, and end customers is over. As quotations are based on customer wishes, flawlessly. And they are able to do this anywhere. You eliminate all ambiguity among dealers.

For instance, ambiguity in price. For every unique composition the purchase price is visible to the dealer. As a result, they always know what margin they have, even with a quotation revision, or when dealing with discounts. Clarity for everything.

Of course, to break language barriers, the configuration tool should support multilingualism. And obviously dealers would also like to give a personal tint to their software, in the form of their corporate identity and the quotation document. 

Read on to find out how all of these possibilities can be realized in Elfsquad CPQ software, in a user-friendly manner.

Your dealer network connected to your production process

The most significant advantage has yet to be shown. When you grant the very same tool to dealers. So that dealers, too, can flawlessly configure and quote. Meaning every accepted quotation is directly sent into ERP in the form of a bill of materials. You connect your dealer network to your production environment. That is digital pre-production, in its prime form. View all of our integrations to see if we connect to your ERP, CAD, CRM, or other business software.

Flawless connection

It was mentioned in the introduction: you want to send dealers on their way with a Sales and Engineering validated sales model. This has two large advantages:

1. You and your dealer are guaranteed that the sold product can also actually be produced. Since the engineers’ and salespeople’s knowledge has been documented in your CPQ software. They have designed the software in a way that it cannot be sold outside of the standard. Not by your dealers, either.
2. Dealers never have to deal with ambiguity towards their end customers anymore. Dealers often lack knowledge about your product range to provide the end customer with technical distinguishing details. Which is exactly what should convince the customer to choose your solution.

Expanding your dealer network

As an entrepreneur you not only look for ways to scale your business, but also for scalability in your company and to optimize corresponding processes. 

Expanding your dealer network is a prominent step in upscaling distribution of your products.

Finding a suitable dealer requires a lot of knowledge transfer. Especially when you are a producer of complex products in a niche market. Technical specialized knowledge in your salespeople and engineers is extremely high. And all of this product-specific knowledge has to be transferred to your dealers. On top of that, there is the commercial insight required for actual sales.

At the very base, you document all knowledge belonging to salespeople and engineers in CPQ: product structures, links between products and modularity. When this base is set, you are able to expand this with commercial texts and images. Eventually, you make the CPQ software available to dealers. Subsequently, they are able to take in all of this knowledge with hardly any effort. And the language barrier is also broken on top of that, through multilingualism in your software. It becomes commercially interesting for dealers to offer you solutions (read: profitability).

If you put yourself in the shoes of one of your dealers, then it is not strange that they want to offer end customers a solution for which:

1. They do not have to put in extra effort during sales.
2. They always know the correct price and are able to distribute correct quotations.
3. They are guaranteed that the sold product can actually be produced.

In other words, dealers would much rather go for your solution than your competitor’s.

Now that is scalable dealer management.

Elfsquad CPQ: The solution for dealer-dependent manufacturing businesses

Our CPQ software contains expansive and distinguishing possibilities regarding dealer management. You manage margins, purchase prices, and rights with a few clicks. Instantly available for you and in your dealer’s Elfsquad environment.

We would be glad to show you all of the possibilities and functionalities in Elfsquad CPQ software through an online demo.

Request an online demo.