Camso hosts first ride-and-drive for dealers

Sept. 21, 2015

Commercial tire dealers left Camso Inc.’s first ride-and-drive event armed with tools to boost sales in an often overlooked part of their businesses: tires and tracks for compact construction equipment.

With more than 20 brands in the compact construction segment, Camso says it needed to do something to stand out in a crowded and somewhat commoditized market. That something is to provide resources that enable its dealers to better support their customers.

Dealers who are improperly trained will sell whatever compact construction tires they have on their floor or the cheapest product they can get their hands on because they are a busy commercial dealership, according to Mike Dembe, market development manager. “Medium truck tires are their primary business. "A lot of times this whole segment of compact construction tires, our specialty, gets overlooked.”

Camso has held meetings with owners and presidents of commercial tire companies for years. Meetings with two groups of commercial tire dealers in Charlotte, N.C., the week of September 14, signaled a different approach. “This is the first time we’ve done this intensive dealer training,” says Dembe.

Camso hosted about 30 employees from commercial tire dealerships in two “train the trainer” sessions. Collectively, they represent about 600 commercial tire locations across the nation. “These are going to be our point people, our insider people, to help train their own people,” says Dembe.

“We wanted to talk to people who were closer to the market, closer to their sales people, there’s not one owner here. We call them key influencers, and we wanted to bring them in for a two-day intensive training session to get our hands dirty, test drive the equipment and see these products in action.”

Camso stepped dealers through its new electronic training tools, Learning Intelligence (LI) and Sales Intelligence (SI). Eight of the 20 training modules were presented to attendees. SI is a mobile app which sales personnel can reference in sales calls and show to customers.

“These training tools are incredibly flexible, we can scale up or scale down to suit their needs, these can be online seminars going forward, these can be face-to-face, they can be quarterly meetings, they can be a self-serve learn as you go at your own pace with these modules,” says Dembe.

The classroom training covered the company’s tires, tracks and over-the-tire tracks (OTT) products. The ride-and-drive portion gave dealers a chance to experience the performance of Camso’s products on various surface conditions and applications. Dembe also gave a demonstration on the ease and speed (about 30 minutes total) involved in attaching the company's OTT product to a skid steer machine.

"I know we’re in the tire business but half to two-thirds of tire dealers in North America are in the rubber track business. They are selling tracks to the same people they would be selling tires to. It’s an add-on sale. Tracks have come on board in a huge way the last ten years. Many, and I’m going to say most, commercial tires dealers today are involved in some level with rubber tracks," says Dembe.

Camso also gave dealers a look at new products planned for 2016.

“For most of our dealers in North America, their main business is commercial truck tires, says Dave Fleischhauer, business line executive director. “So what we want to do is to make it easy for them to be comfortable in this segment that probably represents less than 10% of their revenue. SI is going to be our gateway to sales reps of our partners with real-time accessible information that will enable them to sell our products and solutions.”

For more information on Camso, visit the company's new website www.camso.co.

For recent news on Camso, read:

"Chairman: more on Camso's off-the-road plans"

"Camoplast Solideal becomes Camso"