When it comes to dealing with spare parts, the space for acquiring customers is pretty competitive and generating higher sales numbers become levelled and stagnant after a point when companies do not know how to navigate their sales. If you feel like your growth has met a plateau in sales, or you generally would love to boost your overall spare parts sales, this article is right for you! Let's dive in.
Table of contents
- 5 practical tips to boost your overall spare parts sales
- Have a team designated for sales
- Use service technicians as sales medium
- Simplify the ordering process
- Keep your prices in check and update regularly
- Provide packages of wear parts and maintenance kits
- Identify products critical for customers
- How to include an authorized partner in strategy
- Pre login and post-login for customer-specific pricing
- Engage and fulfill customer requirements
- Build a supply chain to enhance the customer experience
5 practical tips to boost your overall spare parts sales
1) Have a team designated for sales
The aftermarket factor is a severely neglected area in the spare parts business. That is, the marketing aspect of spare parts is often underlooked. As a result, people do not realize the amount of revenue that can be mined with extreme marketing. In most companies, the service domain deals with the customers more than the sales team, but the service domain does not pay attention to the sales opportunities to the sales department as its prime authority.
Therefore, study and revise the structure of your company and identify the pointers that you can turn up. Take your customer's structure into consideration too. Do your customers usually own a maintenance department on their own? How flexible are your customers in terms of price? Depending on the structure, you can mould and create your service sales team to facilitate your customers to the best ability.
2) Use service technicians as sales medium
Service technicians are another portal to great sales potential. Sales technicians can predict and have great insights into the demands and needs of the market. So please take advantage of them too. Ensure that all of your service technicians visit your customers with adequate information about your spare parts, their functioning, and your services. This will help your technicians communicate better with your customers and enrich the customer with detailed information.
Conduct serious workshops and training sessions for your service technicians to help them handle customers and promote your products in the most subtle way possible. This will allow service technicians better to address the customer's needs and secure sales opportunities. Of course, you do not have to turn your service technicians to be a part of your fully-fledged sales team. But, they definitely can be your unofficial brand ambassadors who make things work through their professional proficiency.
3) Simplify the ordering process
This is probably the most crucial aspect to attract customers and improve sales. You have to understand that your customer's equipment is facing some difficulty and needs their equipment to be fixed as soon as possible. No customer wants to spend time figuring out how to navigate around your website and place their orders. So, how do you make your customers find their required products easily? Make sure that you classify and label your spares in a clear-cut manner.
Ensure that your website is optimized to place orders from anywhere and at any time. The process of placing an order should be quick and reliable. Do not forget to offer multiple payment options so that the customer has all forms of choices to choose from. Once you learn to figure this out, you will easily retain more customers, and they'll be satisfied with your service.
Try to adopt a digital data system where your customer can identify the apt spare part that they require and draw in comparable data from operating manuals or other documents. Then, with the help of a text search, 3D visualizations or even QR codes on the machine, customers will be able to effectively pick out the required spare part that they need and order it through your online eCommerce portal.
4) Keep your prices in check and update regularly
Study and analyze your competitors throughout all mediums like eBay, Amazon, and other third-party websites. Check out how they price and evaluate their machine spare parts and see how you'll fare against your competitors with your valuation of pricing. This will help you to get a picture of how you would compete with your competitors.
Google the name of the particular machine spare part and look into the search results for the top results. Next, check out the big names in the industry and find out why they are ranking the way they are. Then, study their user experience, pricing strategies, and the total customer experience they offer. You never know which of these factors could be an element of inspiration for your online eCommerce store.
5) Provide packages of wear parts and maintenance kits
Consistent maintenance and regular replacement of solid wear and tear spare parts are necessary for the operation of heavy equipment, machines and systems. Repetitive contact with high-abrasive materials significantly impacts an equipment's wear and tear.
So, as an owner of these types of equipment, it is necessary for your customers, service technicians and maintenance personnel to buy new parts and replacements. But how do you make things simple and convenient for them? Well, you can make things easier by providing maintenance packages for solid wear and tear parts that should be replaced regularly.
Make sure that you let your customers know about these maintenance kits on your eCommerce site. The instructions related to the maintenance of the machine can be provided with the order number of the respective maintenance kit. This will act as an additional benefit for your customers and will also make sure that all the wear and tear parts are replaced regularly. Thus, higher customer satisfaction and increased sales. Bingo!
5 Strategies every eCommerce site should adopt for successful spare parts sales
This is a common five-fold path that all eCommerce sites should practice to thrive in the spare parts industry.
1. Identify products critical for customers
Always listen to the voice of the customer. Analyze what is moving and what is not. Manage your inventory accordingly.
2. How to include an authorized partner in strategy
Having an official partner on board helps you create trust and create a consistent supply of quality spares.
3. Pre login and post-login for customer-specific pricing
Facilitate an annual maintenance pricing that is fixed for specific customers. You can configure your catalog to create customer groups and offer different prices particular to each group.
4. Engage and fulfill customer requirements
Spare parts eCommerce sites need to make sure that they employ intuitive design, rich content, and interactive functionality in their websites in product recommendations and trends based on previous searches and account settings to fulfill the customer.
5. Build a supply chain to enhance the customer experience
Build consistent supply chain management processes. This will eventually help increase customer loyalty due to improved convenience and better facilitation of workflow, which translates to better sales and conversion value.
Conclusion
There are several trigger points in the aftermarket sector that can boost your spare parts sales, but these trigger points vary from company to company. The goal should be customer satisfaction and the establishment of long-term customer relationships. Taking the time to research your customers and reaching out to them with offers that will help them will lead to higher customer satisfaction and will increase your sales. Good luck!