For many dealers that have embarked on adding ecommerce platforms to their websites, the project stands as a great, unfinished symphony. The truth is, ecommerce will always be an ongoing project for dealers, regardless of what juncture they’re currently occupying.
Once the site has reached the phase where a dealer is comfortable with its look, ease of use, pricing/configurator, (possibly) financing and initial pick list of products, the focus from a customer-facing standpoint can then switch to site enhancements. On the back end, dealers can make use of platform-furnished or third-party analytics that can guide marketing or sales outreach efforts.
In this week’s State of the Industry look at ecommerce, our dealer panel discusses the valuable data and various information that can help further sales efforts and populate a dealer’s CRM with vital information that can set the stage for future engagements.
As visitors to the site go through the actual buildout process with Kelly Office Solutions’ platform, it collects a lot of the pertinent information that would traditionally be garnered through a salesperson-prospect engagement—the size of the company, location, the client’s title—that continues to grow throughout the process. Claudia Coleman, director of marketing for the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, firm, points out that the built-in questioning function guides the users through the list of options that allows them to select the solution that best fits their needs.
“As you move toward the larger equipment, it leads to more questions and unknown situations, at which point they’ll probably need to talk to a sales rep because it becomes too in-depth,” she said. “Obviously, that provides the opportunity for sales reps to sell not just the equipment in question, but other offerings we have as well.”
While MPSToolbox offers its platform users access to a menu of data information, Advanced Imaging Solutions of Las Vegas relies on a combination of analytics feeds, including the Shopify back-end portion of the platform in addition to Google Analytics. According to Keven Ellison, vice president of marketing, users who rely on Google Analytics need to be mindful of the latest update.
“We had to upgrade to GA4 and make sure our sites were compatible with it,” he said. “As of July 1, the legacy product went away.”
Easily, the most important data gleaned by Pulse Technology is the intelligence regarding people who visit the company’s website multiple times per day, as they are the strongest prospects for lead generation. CEO Chip Miceli notes the Schaumburg, Illinois, company leverages these leads through a variety of touchpoints.
“We are big believers in providing as much useful content as possible—blogs, email campaigns, newsletters,” he said. “We have optimized our website so that it is helpful in generating these leads. We view these efforts as a work in progress and are always looking to improve what we do.”
For those dealers still in the early stages of their ecommerce platform—which includes Woodhull LLC of Springboro, Ohio—the quality and depth of the information being gathered continues to improve. Robert Woodhull notes the dealer will be able to convert it into the company’s CRM and help quantify the ROI on the platform. It’s a gradual process, not a race to a finish point, as Woodhull seeks to create a product consistent with what clients have come to expect from the dealer.
“We will get to a price-for-payment point, and there will be integration for financing,” he noted. “We have to do the rollout in a way that makes clients comfortable and ensures that the system is operating at the standard that we expect. It’s important for customers and prospects to experience the standard we’ve set. We can offer ease and still be Woodhull, not Amazon.”
