Erik Cagle
OEM Perspective
From Hosted Events to Lead Generation Tools, Manufacturers Seek to Play Role in Dealer Success
T
his month’s state of the industry report on the value of hosted events may seem to be a rather specific topic. The idea behind the content, quite simply, examines how dealers can use these opportunities to portray themselves as thought leaders, trusted advisors and partners to their end-user clients. So it comes as no surprise that the industry’s manufacturers feel the exact same way toward you, their valued partner. Their success is intertwined with your own, and merely offering their wares to your clients makes you, the dealer, little more than a go-between. Allowing your company to leverage the full range of programs, lead-generation tools, marketing insight, training and, yes, hosted events (either theirs or your own) can enable your dealership to get the most value from the union. We’ve canvassed industry OEMs to learn about the programs they have in place to enable dealers to more-effectively reach deeper within existing accounts and scout out new opportunities.
Brother International: Courtney Behrens, director, lead optimization, B2B marketing Brother International Corporation takes an ‘At Your Side’ approach in working with our dealer partners to generate interest in our products through a variety of programs. We build close relationships with our partners to ensure we understand who their customer bases are and how we can best attract relevant leads—through Brother-generated efforts and through their own. By understanding these target markets, Courtney Behrens we can then present a variety of customizable programs for these partners to utilize. Our programs are omni-channel and encompass email, social, collateral and web assets the partner can repurpose for their end users. We strategize with our partners to provide recommendations on an appropriate mix and cadence of using these assets within a campaign to maximize responses. To help our partners accelerate their campaign efforts, we provide resources in the form of co-op or MDF, chosen based on the volume of revenue that flows through that partner. Brother also conducts 40
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www.enxmag.com | March 2020
lead generation programs internally, and the results of these are passed to our partners. For these types of programs, you get out of them what you put into them. The time spent building relationships with our partners to really understand their businesses puts us in an ideal position to provide the best results on lead-generation programs.
Canon: Leroy Farrell, vice president/general manager, engineering services & solutions Aligning with our customer-first mindset, Canon U.S.A.’s focus does not purely rest on the potential of the products we create, but also the attention of the people who use them. We take pride in delivering high-quality customer service and support excellence to our channel partners and end customers by offering them the necessary tools, systems and resources to help resolve customer concerns quickly and Leroy Farrell efficiently. Through the Canon Smart service system, we are able to offer our dealers and customers a suite of tools that can remotely interface with devices, train customers on device usage, enable dealers to be contacted directly from certain error codes, and more efficiently plan service calls. To help enhance customer experience and increase turnaround time, we also offer 100% U.S.-based customer support through our Customer Solutions Center, for which we are happy to showcase a 94% first-call fix rate. Our main focuses revolve around ensuring that we help to optimize service and operational efficiency for our dealers, and our 11 consecutive Center of Excellence certifications by Benchmark Portal reflect our success in doing so. To bring it all together, Canon also hosts the Engineering and Solutions Summit each year to not only show how we can support our dealers, but also to provide them with key insights and advantages that can help them enhance their service operations through Canon’s solutions. This year, the summit will be taking place in three major cities—Las Vegas, Atlantic City and Nashville— spanning June and July 2020. We Saw It In ENX Magazine
