Learning to learn. Much of Tucker Rocky’s ongoing training goes toward convincing dealers of the value of experimentation. “The good dealers are the ones who manage their product portfolios, who understand their customers’ wants and desires,” Johnson said. “You can’t know that without trying things. You’ve got to put product in stores and try it out.”
The distributor, Johnson said, wants to help its 10,000 dealers run a more successful business. To that end, the company is hosted at this past weekend’s dealer show seven seminars on product displays, social media, staffing, employee training and other topics.
Dealers have given positive feedback about past seminars, Johnson said. “In fact, there have been some dealers that say, ‘We come really for the training. The product is sort of an added benefit.’ Our goal obviously is to educate and to train them, but also give them more reasons and better reasons to come,” Johnson said.
For the past few years, Johnson also has led a push to create the training videos found at TuckerRocky.TV. The company has an in-house videographer and has built its own studio complete with teleprompters and professional editing software.
Many of the videos are aimed at training Tucker’s 145 outside sales reps. Johnson said the videos allow for greater retention compared with traditional training in which sales reps visit vendor booths for crash courses.
In fact, Johnson said he was spending most the dealer show trying to convince vendors to take advantage of Tucker Rocky’s free video production service. “Videos are so much more effective than just spending 10 minutes with a rep because videos will be there three weeks from now and three months from now. And it’s professional. It’s concise. It’s well thought-out.”
The reps are now required to have iPads so they can more easily show the latest videos to dealers. Call it trickle-down knowledge.
Said Johnson: “That is the key thing in this industry: How do we educate our reps to where they can better support our dealers? How do we better educate our dealers to where they can better support their consumers? If we can figure out the keys to doing that, we’ll all win.”
