For distributors that take the time to structure a new vending program for guaranteed ROI, offering a free vending machine to customers can be a powerful selling tool, helping sales reps to land new business, increase existing customer spend and improve customer stickiness. Because of vending’s positive impact on customer retention, though, it’s critical that sales reps offer vending proactively, before customers accept a machine from a competitor.
Unfortunately, distributors tell us that their sales reps tend to offer vending reactively, waiting for customers to ask about it or for them to place a competitor’s machine. Vending is a powerful selling tool, giving reps an opportunity to talk about more than just price. So why aren’t reps more proactive?
We’ve found that sales reps make incorrect assumptions about vending that prevent them from wholeheartedly embracing it, pulling the rug out from under new initiatives and stalling ongoing programs. To convince your customers to participate in a vending program, you must first convince your own sales reps by debunking these three common myths:
Myth No. 1: “Our customers will never agree to give us more of their business – we’ve already tried.”
Customers can be incredibly stubborn in their refusal to move business when the only thing in it for them is a small discount. Sales reps know this well. But when the same customers grasp the benefits of using a vending machine, which often includes inventory consumption reductions of more than 30%, they become surprisingly eager to shift spend. Even the stodgiest and most reluctant customers have surprised our distributors with a sudden and drastic change of heart once vending is on the table. One of our customers (an independent distributor in Kansas), for example, was astonished to see a sales increase of “at least 40 percent” in one customer after placing a vending machine.
Myth No. 2: “Vending programs take too much time to set up.”
It’s true that some industrial vending machine suppliers make it difficult to get a machine up and running, requiring time-consuming configuration, long and/or expensive customer trainings and expensive in-person installations. Other providers, though (including 1sourcevend), make machines’ hardware and software so easy to set up that software training can be accomplished in a short, online session, and hardware installation can be completed independently of a supplier visit. While it’s true that there is an initial time investment, the process is much simpler than many sales reps imagine.
Myth No. 3: “Vending programs are extremely time-consuming to manage.”
Sales reps who have never managed a vending program before imagine that once they place a machine, the burden of frequent, in-person inventory counts will fall to them, cutting into the time they have available to pursue new business. In fact, the opposite is true.
Modern cloud-based inventory-control software tracks on-hand inventory and makes that information available online, from any location or device, saving reps the trouble of driving to the customer to conduct manual inventory counts. When an item’s designated minimum is hit, the software can automatically trigger a purchase order during the next designated order window, which means reps spend less time creating quotes and writing orders. Out-of-stocks are also less common with a cloud-based vending system, so reps spend less time on heroic recoveries. These sales efficiencies more than make up for the time spent re-stocking machines.
Setting up a vending program can feel like a leap of faith for distributors and their sales teams. Once programs are up and running, though, our customers assure us that their investments have yielded lucrative returns. Get a breakdown of the variables that determine the profitability of a vending program in How to Calculate Vending ROI, published by Modern Distribution Management.
Not convinced that a vending machine and its software can be set up for a customer in as little as an afternoon? Let us prove it to you via a free online demo of the software that comes standard with our machines, during which we can also explain machine installation.
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