Dealer Lots

By Phil Carselowey, NewFound Rentals

As a dealer for sheds, garages and/or carports it’s essential to have a sales lot that promotes success. Your lot could be manned or unmanned. Whatever it may be, for it to be successful you need to make sure that sales lots are welcoming, informative, and fresh! In this article we will learn how to accomplish these things for your physical sales lots!

Let’s start with location, location, location. You’ll want to do research on the population around the lot you are considering as well as get a traffic count on the lot. Another great thing to consider for your location is if traffic stops at or around the location. Next, you’ll need to negotiate as competitive of a rent price or purchase price as you can. Remember that the lower the overhead the more opportunity for success. Don’t be afraid to negotiate!

Once you’ve landed a location it’s time to move in inventory. You’ll want as many units at your location as possible. Make sure you supply your lot with a wide variety of units. You want your potential customers to be able to view anything from an economy shed to a gazebo to a finished-out cabin. The unique units on your lot will increase interest, traffic, and phone calls. This large variety will also help the customer create a vision of what they are needing.

You’ll want to place your units in a strategic manner. Utilize as much road frontage as you can. Create a driving path with your units that allow customers to drive in one way and out another way. This creates a circular motion and allows your sales team two opportunities to engage the potential customers. Make sure your entrance point is easy to find and is extremely welcoming!

Keep your units fresh. It’s important to move your units around to keep the customers curious. If they get used to seeing the same units in the same place when they drive by, they will start to get bored with what’s going on. When you have the moving equipment at your lot, move your frontage units and rearrange them to prevent a stale look. Also, get creative by opening all the doors on your units periodically to turn some heads and catch the attention of drive-by traffic.

Another aspect of keeping your lot fresh is the maintenance. Keep it mowed, have the driving area looking nice, place some units on a pad, and do some landscaping around a few display units. This creates a clean image and allows customers to envision what the units would look like in their backyards. Having pads and landscaping on your units will also allow you to up-sell those services!

Literature and signage are your friend. Research shows that most customers like to shop by themselves and educate themselves without engaging with a salesperson. This means that most of your customers are checking you out online and coming to your lot after hours and on days you aren’t open. So, if your lot is unmanned or has closed hours, we must use literature to educate the customers. Be strategic with your signage and literature.

Signage & Literature

I like to consider the signage and content to be layered. Give the customer what they want based on how far or close they are to your products. The customer driving down the road wants less information than the customer that gets out of their car and steps into one of your display units. If they are 100 feet away, don’t give them much content; if they are 2 feet away, give them more content because they are demonstrating that they want to learn more.

Large signs or banners are your first move, “layer one” I call them. Your layer one content needs to be large and have a short message. Make sure your customers driving down the road can read and digest your layer one signage. Name of your business, products that you sell and how to get a hold of you are good examples of layer one content.

Your second layer of content needs to address the cars that drive into your lot. Imagine posters or laminated sheets on the outside of your buildings that someone can read from their car as they drive through your lot. This layer of content needs to have “trigger words.” Trigger words are things that would increase interest to the customer to explore your offerings more. A few examples could be: Ask About Same as Cash, Rent to Own No Credit Check, 30-Year Warranty, Satisfaction Guaranteed, Call or Text at Anytime, etc.

The third layer of content is for the customers who are willing to get out of their cars and are digging for information, most likely walking into your units. This content needs to be very granular and needs to educate the customer as much as possible. My recommendations here are pricing, brochures, business cards and interactive content. The interactive content can be a sheet for the customer to take with them to compare your shed to the other sheds they are considering. It could also be a QR Code that drives the customers to your Google reviews, 3-D builder, or a rent-to-own application.

Try these strategies out and happy selling! I’ll see you at the top! GSCB