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Equipment dealers rarely only sell one item, instead they generally sell an array of different machines to suit different purposes. This is because it is almost impossible to cover your operating costs when you are relying on a given geographical area’s demand for just one product. Furthermore, you can make it convenient for your customers when you have your store be a destination where they can pick up multiple things they need.

 

Let’s say you are an OPE dealer and you sell, among other items, chain saws and leaf blowers. These two machines accomplish very different tasks, so it is unlikely that someone will come into your store wanting to buy both (unless their desire is to fully equip themselves for all their future landscaping chores). However, you can argue that since chopping down trees or pruning their limbs creates a lot of debris, it would be prudent to buy both so that after you are done you can easily tidy up.

 

There are lots of synergisms (an interaction of several things that results in a greater effect than the sum of the things’ individual effects) you can find from a marketing perspective between machines, and not just in the OPE world. The same goes for construction, agriculture, and marine equipment. They’re not that hard to imagine: if you’re going to buy a table saw you should probably buy a shop vacuum, if you’re going to buy an earth auger for planting you most likely will want a sprayer to fertilize with, and if you are picking up a jet ski you definitely should think about a buying a dock lift to make it easier to stow and launch. But, the problem once you come up with how products match up is figuring out how to capitalize on those ideas.

 

One of the ways you can promote cross-selling has to do with merchandising. Displays showing the two (or more) products you think go together together can help get the ball rolling, and so can shelving proximity. Also, you can train your salespeople to ask customers, ‘since you are buying x have you thought about buying y?’

 

Another way is to start promotions where customers get discounts on certain products, but only when they also buy certain other products. The goal isn’t to get the customer to buy one or the other – rather you want them to buy both. Reducing the overall price can make the decision an easier choice for the customer.

 

Sometimes synergisms between products are discovered after the fact. Data, when it is accessible and housed in a useful way, can be used to identify which products sell the most when they are bought with specific other products. Analysis like this can be done by hand, but it is much, much easier when you have your data in a program that’s designed for gleaning sales insights - a la a CRM.