Toro: Matching customers to dealers

Customer-centric options provide a slick path to the most appropriate outlets.

The Site

Toro, a producer of lawn care and landscaping products, has a Dealer/Distributor Locator that is tailored for each of its major customer groups in the US and Canada, its home market. The locator’s introduction page, Where to Buy, Service, or Rent your Toro, offers a choice of six ‘product markets’ defined initially by customer type (for example, Homeowner, Professional Contractor) or type of work (for example, Golf Course Management and Sports Turfs & Grounds). Under each heading is a list of the products and models covered; for example, Professional Contractor covers “landscape contractor equipment, Dingo products”.

Clicking on a market leads to a customised selector further down the page that uses dropdown menus and Zip/postal code fields to set the parameters for a dealer/distributor search. Users are clearly informed that “not all products are available at all locations” and search results will show no match. The results cover postal, telephone, fax, e-mail and web details.

The Takeaway

Toro’s Dealer/Distributor Locator neatly reflects and exploits the product-based structure of the business and its customer-centric terminology to provide a slick service both for customers and the dealer network. For other non-selling sites it provides a good model of how to forward potential business to the most appropriate outlet.

More smart sales assistant than order taker, the locator first gets customers to identify themselves or their needs (providing useful lists to help clarify the options) – rather than a catalogue requirement – before directing them to a tool tailored to the appropriate product range, service type and location options. The idea is clearly to extract no more detail than is needed to direct the customer to their nearest dealer/distributor where a serious sales conversation is more profitable to all concerned. It also helps Toro’s relationship with its dealers, on whom it ultimately depends for sales, to show it is using its site to minimise ‘wrong’ or inappropriate enquiries.

First published on 03 April, 2007