Equipment Sales When an equipment dealership represents a wide variety of industryleading brands, selling the machinery might seem an easy task — to the extent that brand performance and reliability sell themselves. Yet, there always are underlying market currents that can weaken foundational assumptions about who is going to buy how many of what type of equipment. As Vice President of Sales at Kirby-Smith Gavin Cole, Vice Machinery Inc., Gavin Cole is President, Sales tasked with managing the direction of the company’s sales strategy, which means he needs to be able to interpret what he is seeing in the market and to anticipate what he can’t see so that the growth of the company is not slowed. That is a big job. Cole called 2023 a “transitional year” for contractors after surviving the various challenges of the pandemic, followed by the accelerated growth and supply chain issues of 2022 — disrupted projects, unanticipated labor shortages and availability issues on machinery, parts and labor. Now, equipment owners face even more change as finance rates increase, the lending environment tightens and residential development patterns shift. “A lot of contractors are looking at the services they’ve historically provided and then taking inventory of how to expand and remain
Owners face even more change as finance rates increase, the lending environment tightens and residential development patterns shift.
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