At the risk of making this column political, I’ll remind readers that everything is political.
No, I’m not talking about national or global events. I’m talking about your relationships with your vendors and your clients.
In the movie “Jerry Maguire,” Tom Cruise’s mentor, legendary sports agent Dicky Fox, says, “The key to this business is personal relationships!”
Regardless of your place in this business — manufacturer, distributor or dealer — you’re dependent on your relationships with the people around you, both vendors and clients, and their goodwill toward you. If you want to succeed, you need to be mindful of that.
If that’s not political, I don’t know what is.
The reason I bring this up is that your business decisions need to consider not only the dollars and cents, but also the optics — how others will perceive what you’re doing.
Here’s an example none of us at my company anticipated: adding a “Find a Dealer” feature to our website.
Most brand websites include a tool that lets people browsing the site find the nearest reseller on a map.
Simple, right?
You might think so, but you’d be wrong. Let me tell you how we found that out.
As a distributor, our website serves as both our catalog and dealer portal. You can only see dealer pricing and stock status if you have an account and log in.
Even if you’re not logged in, the site is still visible to casual browsers and end users searching for our brands.
And that’s actually a good thing. I regularly get calls from end users who find our site and want to buy our products.
I always take the time to qualify them and direct them to whichever of my dealers is closest and best suited to their needs.
That’s why we tried adding a “Find a Dealer” feature a few years ago.
Here’s what went wrong.
Obviously, the search filtered by geographic proximity to the user. After that, we ranked results by each dealer’s annual sales volume with us.
That’s when I started getting angry calls from some of my dealers.
“Lee! Why is our company only on PAGE FOUR of your search results?!”
Well, the reason is that your company didn’t do very much business with us last year.
But I can’t say that — it would only make the situation worse.
And it wasn’t just one dealer, or just in my territory. There were several across the country.
Now, every customer matters — big and small — and we don’t want hurt feelings.
So we asked ourselves: How should we sort the results to be fair?
After much consideration, we decided to list them alphabetically.
Let me tell you what happened next.
I got a call from a high-volume regional dealer whose company name starts with C.
“Lee! Why is [expletive deleted] Best Buy ahead of me on the dealer search?!”
We hadn’t considered the animosity big regional dealers have toward national big-box retailers.
OK, back to the drawing board.
In the end, we couldn’t find a way to present the search results that wouldn’t make someone angry. So we scrapped the dealer locator altogether.
I think it’s better this way. I still get end-user leads, and I pass them on to my dealers. They know that — and they appreciate it.
And keeping my dealers happy is 99% of my job, after all.