“OF COURSE WE WANT YOUR BUSINESS, BUT MORE THAN THAT WE WANT YOUR REPEAT BUSINESS.”
Paul Adams Director of Marketing Rapids Wholesale Equipment Co. Marion, Iowa
PAUL ADAMS
RAPIDS FOODSERVICE CONTRACT & DESIGN
congratulations to customers on new openings and images of customers’ dishes on a bi-weekly basis. Posts also include special discounts such as $5 off a purchase for signing up for emails on Facebook, or to write a review on Yelp. Often, these become fun contests for the Action Sales staff to see who can bring in the most new customers.
Bringing eyes to websites is, of course, a major goal. Once there, the objective is to get customers to stay, spend time on the site, and ultimately make a purchase. To do that, many dealers have redesigned their sites to attract and hold visitors longer. Culinex, in Fargo, North Dakota, has a virtual showroom on its website allowing visitors to walk through, aisle by aisle. Company president Mark Howes hopes to eventually make it possible for customers to virtually pick up products off the shelves as they do their walk- through, and drop them in a shopping basket for purchase.
A welcome video on the Culinex site also lets would-be customers know the value in choosing Culinex over other suppliers. Plus, the company has repurposed the video – embedding it into a physical prospecting card that plays the “who we are” message when a recipient opens it; Culinex can snail-mail the card, hand it out at trade shows, etc.
Dealers like ACityDiscount and Rapids Wholesale are using chat bots to engage and retain visitors to their sites. Both companies have a live chat feature during normal business hours.
“Our chat feature gives visitors a chance to browse uninterrupted for a little bit, then fires off a proactive message letting them know there’s a real, live foodservice expert waiting to answer any information they can’t find,” Adams says. “If so, a quick question posed to visitors routes their inquiry to the appropriate person – product questions to a sales professional, order follow-ups to customer service, and so forth.”
Closing the Sale
Beyond a website or even a web store,
dealers find e-commerce sites suit a variety of their needs. The most obvious, of course, is an easier way for customers to access their inventory of products. Some distributors, like ACityDiscount, were early e-commerce adopters and have easily adapted to pandemic conditions as a result. Many dealers now implementing their own e-commerce sites,
however, don’t intend to
compete with companies like Amazon or even other equipment dealers that specialize in e-commerce.
“Our business model has been built on inside salespeople working with many of our larger chain and commercial accounts and walk-in customers,” Yeung says. “We’re starting our e-commerce site as a convenience for existing customers, not to compete with Amazon or big players in e-commerce.” To do that, Action Sales
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