Somewhere right now there is a dealership marketing person standing in an empty parking lot at seven in the evening, waiting for golden hour, so the new van wrap really pops.
Three-quarter angle.
Wheels turned out.
Maybe a technician leaning against the fender with his arms crossed like he's on the cover of a service department calendar.
I love these photos. I have saved some of them. (This is a strange hobby and I have made my peace with it.)
Last week I was going through a stack of them and something jumped out at me. Every one of those vans is wrapped with the dealer's name, the logo, a phone number, and a studio shot from the OEM. You know the one, with the transparent background. It used to take hours to remove that background in Photoshop and now AI does it in a snap.
Beautiful van. Thirty thousand dollars of rolling billboard, and the message on the side of it is we exist, call us.
Meanwhile the value you bring to the customer is inside the van, where nobody has ever looked.
Seen a forklift in the wild? Or an unusually well-composed van portrait? Send it my way. I'm not kidding.
About a hundred years ago, a copywriter named Claude Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery. It was fifth in beer sales in America at the time and they needed help.
On the tour, he saw a plate-glass room where the beer was cooled in filtered air. A filter made of white wood pulp that every single drop had to pass through. Bottles washed four times by machinery. A well drilled four thousand feet down for clean water, on a property sitting right on the shore of Lake Michigan. And a yeast they finally landed on after one thousand and eighteen experiments, with every batch since grown out of that same mother cell.
He asked the obvious question. Why does nobody know about any of this?
They told him it wasn't worth mentioning, because every brewery does it the same way.
He wrote the ads anyway and described all of it, in detail, in public. Here is how he summed up what happened, in his own book:
"All the claims were such as any brewer might have made. They were mere essentials in ordinary brewing. But he was the first to tell the people about them, while others cried merely 'pure beer.'"
The beer never changed. The sales did.
Imagine a copywriter saving your business. You don't have to change much about the way you do business. It's mostly about improving the story you have about it.
Family owned since 1961.
Any make, any model.
We sell solutions.
Committed to your uptime
All true, all generic, all unprovable, and every competitor in your market has some version of those same four lines sitting on their website in a different font.
You think your service is better than the dealer's across town.
You're probably right. You have techs who have been there twenty years and you have watched them do things nobody asked them to do.
The competition believes the exact same thing about his dealership, with the same conviction, and he has the same twenty-year techs. You cannot both be right, and your customer has no way to check either one of you.
So you hope the customer notices. That is the entire differentiation plan at most dealerships. Run a good shop and hope somebody notices.
You cannot prove better. You can prove a number, a photo, or a report with a date on it.
When I work with a forklift dealership, I end up doing the same thing Hopkins did on that brewery tour, except mine happens on a video call and nobody ever offers me a beer. Somebody walks me through how they do something, and I sit there thinking, why doesn't anybody know about this?
(Claude Hopkins, the copywriter, to be clear. Not Claude the AI tool. Claude the AI chatbot does not have feelings because it is a robot.)
So I'm going to say it right here. Forklift dealerships need to name what they do.
You run frameworks, systems, and processes every day. Your customer never hears about them.
Keeping these frameworks hidden leaves money on the table. It's the rare kind of advantage you can pick up without buying equipment, opening a branch, or hiring one more person. You already do the work. You just have to “framework-atize” and say it out loud.
What does your dealership do that it never talks about? What's sitting right under your nose?
Oh, I don't know. How about:
Your awesome service van
A forklift inspection checklist your customers have never seen
The ability to look at a truck and know that he has lived his best life and it might be time for a nice farm upstate
Let's name all three.
1. The right part in the service van
Whoever stocks your service vans is not working off a generic list.
They stock for the trucks that are actually in your territory, because a second trip costs more than carrying the part. That is a real decision that costs real money, made on purpose by somebody who thought hard about it. No customer has ever heard about it.
Do your field techs complete the repair on the first visit? Your first-time fix rate is sitting in your dispatch data right now. Go pull it. If you fix it on the first visit nine times out of ten, put that sentence on your website, in your email signature, and on the side of that beautiful van.
Your competitor is probably at nine out of ten too. He just never thought to say it.
2. The written forklift inspection report
Your techs already run this inspection.
It lives in your ERP or a very ugly Word doc. (Sorry, I'm a snob about ugly Word docs. Just give it to me and let me redesign it with your logo, formatting and brand colors.)
The mighty forklift inspection checklist is a powerful marketing tool that the marketing team has never seen.
Get it out where the customer can see it: photos of the worn fork, the stretched chain, the cracked hose. Add a plain English answer about whether the truck is fine and put it in their hands inside two days.
If you serve government, food, military, or anybody with a safety officer and a lawyer on speed dial, that report is what they're actually buying.
3. The retire-it call
Every service manager reading this has told a customer to quit dumping money into a forklift.
It happens maybe twice a year, and it buys more trust than anything else you do all year, because you're talking yourself out of revenue and the customer knows it. Right now it happens by accident.
Name your forklift end-of-life process. Make your frameworks and processes public.
I gave a client this exact advice this year. Do the written report, put it in the customer's hands, make it the thing you get known for.
Then we looked at what it would take to get every technician at every branch creating the same report the same way, and I could see the two of us still arguing about the template in November. So we went soft on the report and shipped the campaign.
I still think that was the right call. I also think about it more than I'd like to.
I heard a Rory Sutherland quote, and I've been thinking about it all week.
Make desirable things, or make things desirable.
Sutherland stops there. I don't think you get to pick one. You need both, and they aren't equal, because it is much easier to make a good thing sound good than to make a bad thing sound good.
Hopkins did not ask his question in a vacuum. He walked through that brewery and saw filtered air, a wood pulp filter, and a well drilled four thousand feet down next to a lake. That's why he asked why nobody knew about it. If the place had been filthy and half broken, he would have kept his mouth shut and gone home.
Some things you do want to keep to yourself.
So step one is: be worth talking about. If your dealership takes the cheapest route on every decision, this advice isn’t for you. Framework-atizing won't save you.
(That dealership is probably not reading this newsletter anyway. But you are, which tells me you probably have a process or service worth naming.)
Naming what you do costs nothing. Getting every tech at every branch to do it the same way every time is the hard part, and that's where most dealers give up.
Good. Let them. If this were easy, everybody in your market would already be doing it, and you'd be right back to competing on price.
The dealer across town doesn't run a better service department than you. He just has a name for what he does.
Name one thing you already do. Increase the perceived value of what you do.
➡ Ask your service manager what happens on a service call that the customer never sees
➡ Write down the steps, all of them, the way Hopkins wrote down the wood pulp filter
➡ Give it a name your CSSR can say on the phone without feeling silly. Plain beats clever
➡ Write one sentence about what the customer gets because of it (see the Where there's a why, there's a buy framework here.)
➡ Find the proof. The number out of your system, the photo, the report, the thing a customer can actually look at
➡ Have the service team say it out loud on every call this week and see what comes back
Everybody in your market does some version of the same work. If you want to stand out and be different, you have to claim it.
Pick a process and make it better before you name it. Refine what you do so it's worth talking about.
Where could you honestly do a stronger job? Add the step you keep meaning to add, number it, and write the standard down. Then hold your team to it until it's true on every truck, every time, because the first day a customer tests it is the day it becomes your reputation or your problem.
Then name it and claim it.
That's both halves of the Sutherland quote, in the right order.
If you're still reading, here's where you get real. Is anybody at your dealership actually thinking about these kinds of things? Is anyone responsible for finding this stuff and doing something with it?
You're inside the jar. You cannot read the label from in there, and that is not a knock on you; it's just where you're standing. So who's outside the jar for you? Who's looking at what you do all day and asking why nobody knows about it?
Or is that seat empty?
I call it the Empty Marketing Seat.
(See what I did there. I named it.)
Email me and tell me who's sitting in that seat at your place. Is it you? If the answer is nobody, you're in good company, and that's the conversation I'd like to have.
Julie
P.S. If you're the person at your dealership who takes the van photos, you are doing the Lord's work and I mean that sincerely.