The fourth-quarter holiday selling season is when brands spend the most on running promotions with their dealers. They’ll run promos elsewhere in the year, too, of course. They’re often centered around new product launches, but they’ll also run when brands think their quarterly sales are lagging and they want to move the needle.

Which is great. Everyone likes making more money.

When one of our brands floated the idea of running a sales contest for their resellers in midsummer, it was for two reasons: they’d debuted a new line and June sales are historically slow for them, so why not give them a boost?

I’m all in favor of that! However, my opinion on how best to do that differed from theirs.

They asked us to pick our top 10 independent dealers nationwide and ask them to participate in the promotion.

Here’s where I dissented: Not to point out the obvious, but our top 10 dealers are already our top 10 dealers.

That’s fantastic. I cherish those relationships and their sales volume.

But when your dealer is already doing significant numbers, it’s a lot harder to eke growth out of them. You should absolutely still run promotions with them, don’t get me wrong.

What I’m saying is that if you’re looking to score a big win easily, look at your mid-volume dealers and ask yourself, “Will this incentivize them to do more business with us?”

If you’re a brand or a distributor, outside of your top-volume dealers, your low-to-mid volume dealers are low-to-mid volume for one of two reasons:

• They’re small and don’t do very much business
• They actually do quite a lot of business, they’re just not buying much from you

There’s nothing you can do about the first one. The second one you do have some control over.

It’s been my experience that, more often than not, if a dealer is doing more business with another brand, it’s my fault. It means I need to do a better job of getting to know them, building a relationship, listening to them and finding ways to meet their needs.

Steering away from that tangent back to the main subject, go to your dealers that do OK sales volume, but you know have the potential to grow and give them an incentive to do so.

For example, during the promo period, you’ll do a sell-through credit that first gives the dealer enhanced margins on their sales, and second, a per-unit spiff for their salespeople, who’ll earn extra cash for moving product.

Everyone likes making more money, and you’ve given both the dealer and their sales team a reason to give you more of their business.

Setting this up is more work than just running a sales report and selecting the top dealers from the list. You’ve got to go deeper and know the particulars of each account on the list, so you can identify the ones you’re most likely to grow with.

It makes me think of the World War II diagram of an airplane riddled with bullet holes: Allied planes were returning from battle with damage in specific areas. Initial wisdom was to reinforce those areas with increased armor. Then someone smarter insisted that they needed to reinforce the areas without damage, because planes that were hit there weren’t coming back at all.

There’s an old saying that goes “if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always have.” If you want different results, then do something different.