Ultimate Guide to Winning In The Aftermarket Sales!

Surya SK
April 20, 2022

For OEMs, the aftermarket sales are pretty significant and need to be taken complete advantage of. Each experience you provide your customer with after their purchase will lead to them figuring out if they would continue to do business with you or jump to an alternative supplier. 

Developing your customer loyalty is the top priority during aftermarket sales. When you run your strategies right, you can view customer satisfaction increasing simultaneously along with revenue.

Keeping the opportunities and challenges in balance is the core aspect of a well-oiled aftermarket sales strategy. Here's The Ultimate Guide To Winning in the Aftermarket sales. Let's get right to it!

Table of contents

5 Key strategies to implement in your aftermarket sales

Here we have compiled five of the essential strategy to look out for and implement in your aftermarket sales. Let's see how you can implement them in your business model: 

1. Review your aftermarket strategy

Review your aftermarket strategy

Whether you're beginning an all-new aftermarket strategy or following an old school approach, reassessing your aftermarket strategy is a chance to cut costs, attain organizational alignment, and ramp up revenue. 

So, are you bringing the best out of your business module? As the aftermarket continues to grow, many original equipment manufacturers are facing the need to acknowledge B2B and B2C models to facilitate the alterations brought on online. 

  • Another critical aspect to remember is to establish strong customer relationships. If you're all in your aftermarket strategy, you would precisely know how much money isn't being invested in aftermarket sales by OEMs. Keep the customer aware of your service and aftersales support during the sales process. Be it B2B or B2C, establishing strong customer relationships is a high priority. 
  • Make use of all the available resources. To gain any type of advantage over your competitors, it's critical to take leverage of any form of help you can get your hands on. For example, you were making use of technology for any repetitive and redundant tasks that are taxing on your resources in the aftermarket. This approach relieves your team from the pressure to provide human-to-human contact when the challenges are upscaled. 

2. Figure out your challenges

Figure out your challenges

As an original equipment manufacturer, increasing efforts to boost market share in the aftermarket is necessary for development, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges. 

Below are a few critical issues that will draw additionally on your resources and enlarge the costs implicated in catering to your aftermarket consumers. 

  • Catering to customers efficiently is an attribute that's necessary to see profits in aftermarket sales. So aim to build strong relationships with customers who stay loyal to you and come back for their aftermarket needs and customers who seek you for their equipment support.
  • Be sure to manage and optimize your inventory. Optimization of stock is probably the biggest aftermarket issue for original equipment manufacturers. However, making sure that there is a balance between supply and demand to keep up with the availability of spare parts is not easy since equipment breakdowns are unpredictable. Please make use of real-time data on customers, their products, and their buying behaviours to improve forecast accuracy.
  • Enhance support with the help of tech. To reach this goal, you will have to take advantage of technology and keep track of your metrics regarding you meeting your customers' aftermarket requirements. 
  • If metrics showcase demand for a buffer inventory to protect your customers from downtime, then get one. You can play with your aftermarket costs to express the additional charges of carrying your inventory. These adjustments are necessary for spare parts that are key to your customers and that can't be acquired from anywhere else. 

3. Use analytics for meeting market potential

I can't emphasize this enough. First, you need a legit aftermarket analytics tool that has the potential of displaying real-time data. 

Data collected by your eCommerce platform can make the management of the aftermarket for OEMs way easier. For example, integrating data analytics allows precise analysis of parts searches to order. 

4. Enable a customer-centric approach

The ultimate aim of the aftermarket is not to sell something. Instead, the objective is to ensure that the customer is content with their buying decision and experience from their sales. Original equipment manufacturers who do this retain customers and boost revenue. Here are a few ways to achieve an aftermarket customer-centric approach:

  • Customer Onboarding. After every piece of equipment leaves your facility, your customer should get all the necessary details about how they can contact you, claim a warranty and more. You can even play around with email marketing. This can play a pivotal role in automating this experience. 

5. Use big data for driving sales

Use big data for driving sales

Big data has had its impact on pretty much all aspects. Acquiring data is simple, but how you put that data to use is what matters most. Possessing the analytics capabilities to turn OEM data into legit insights will make a key difference to your aftermarket performance. 

  • Try to read data points that bring out and expose significant trends and patterns through accumulated data, then imply them to the forecasting of future aftermarket parts sales, 
  • Imply analytics to represent data that showcase the spares parts that sell, highlight details about pricing and the estimate at which SKUs are moving. This will help your sales team trust your aftermarket sales efforts and showcase how favourable analytics can be when used in the development of sales strategy. Using the accumulated data will help you to arrive at real-time decisions with real-time data. 

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed our ultimate guide on how to crack aftermarket sales. We are confident that you can use the tips in this post to take your aftermarket sales to the next level. 

It is essential to review the above strategies to improve on the small details and impact your customers. To gain new insights, refer to this guide throughout the fiscal year. Good luck!