I saw it last weekend on a dirt road outside Rogers, Arkansas, on something with tires taller than I am.
It was yellow. Not Clark green. Yellow, like every other piece of construction equipment ever built.
Wrong color, wrong machine, wrong location, and I still knew whose it was before I knew what it was.
CLARK Material Handling Company has been telling the story of how they invented the forklift since 1917. There is a CLARK History Hall inside their headquarters in Flower Mound. (I’m still waiting on my invitation.)
What I did not know is that Clark made earth-moving equipment.
So I went digging. (ha, get it? *slaps knee)
1953, Clark bought Michigan Power Shovel and started building earth-moving equipment in In
1969, Clark bought Melroe, the company that made the Bobcat skid steer
1992, Clark sells off the forklift business
1995, Ingersoll Rand buys what’s left
2007, Doosan bought that and renamed the whole thing Bobcat
After collaborating with Midco on a forklift history post about Bobcat, I thought I knew forklift history.
Clark Equipment Company never went away. It’s called Bobcat now.
The forklift side split off in 1992 and kept the name. That’s the Clark you sell today. Last year, they moved their global headquarters back to Texas and called it an American homecoming.
Two companies, one 1917 origin story, and both put their names on forklifts now.
Acquisitions, a corporate divorce, a name that outlived the company, and an international homecoming. Netflix is leaving money on the table.
I wasn’t the first to think of this.
I heard something in my marketing mastermind group that I cannot stop thinking about.
At any given moment, only about 5% of your market is ready to buy. The other 95% are years away from buying.
Now put that against the typical forklift sales cycle.
A forklift territory manager or sales rep gets paid to sell to the 5% who are ready to buy. That is the right use of their time.
A good forklift rep knows things you cannot put in a CRM.
They know the gate code at the poultry plant.
They know the receiving manager takes lunch at 11:15 because the line runs at noon, and after that, nobody on that dock is talking to anybody.
They keep a spare pair of steel toes behind the seat of the truck, because the last time they forgot, they did the whole walkthrough from the doorway like a vampire who had not been invited in.
They know which accounts want a phone call first, and which ones want them to just show up with two coffees.
That rep finds deals nobody else knew existed.
They also cannot be in more than one place at a time.
You have a sales team. Territories. A CRM, a quota, a comp plan, and a pipeline meeting on Monday, where somebody asks why the number is soft. You have a sales manager whose entire job is to make sure the 5% is covered.
That is not a criticism. That’s a strategy, and it works. It is the reason your dealership exists.
Now answer the same questions about the other 95%.
Who owns it? What is the number? Which meeting is it discussed in? Who gets asked about it on Monday morning?
For most dealerships, the honest answer is nobody.
That is the gap. There is no strategy for the 95%, and nobody was ever assigned to write one.
I wrote recently about A New Way to Hand Forklift Reps Hot Leads, where I mentioned the Markets tool in HubSpot.
Here is what I did with it. I built a market for one of my clients: every industry in their territory that could plausibly buy a forklift. That gave me their TAM, the total addressable market. Then I ran filters to get it down to a number we could actually work with.
3,558 companies.
Say each one buys two forklifts. At $38,000 a truck, that territory is worth $270 million.*
Only 5% are in the market today. That is 178 companies, roughly $13.5 million. Real money, and it is the money your reps are already fighting for.
The other 95% is $257 million sitting in various stages of not-yet.
I’ll say it again: I am loving the HubSpot Buyer Intent tool. That same account shows 47 companies in their market actively researching right now. Forklifts, floor scrubbers, racking. Nobody filled out a form. I’ll hand those leads to the sales team, and revenue follows. That’s a strategy and a system to get at the $13.5 million available in your market.
Everyone in your market buys eventually. The only question is whether they remember you when they do.
Add up everything your dealership spends to win the 5%. Commissions, salaries, mileage, CRM seats, trade shows, recruiting, training, and the hours your sales manager spends in pipeline meetings.
That number is big, and it should be. There is $13.5 million on the table, and you built a machine to go get it.
Now add up what you spend to reach the other 95%. Content, email, your website, LinkedIn. Anything that demonstrates your authority and that a company can find two years before they call you.
Put the two numbers next to each other.
For most dealerships, the second number is a small fraction of the first. Nearly all of the spending goes after $13.5 million. Almost none of it goes after $257 million.
There is a name for that imbalance. Marketers call it short-termism, and Les Binet and Peter Field have about a thousand case studies showing where it leads. Spend everything on harvesting demand that already exists, and you win this quarter and shrink over the next five years.
Both numbers should be deliberate. Right now, only one of them is.
Nobody chose that split. It happened because the 5% has a team asking for money every quarter, and the 95% doesn’t have a champion.
That exercise takes 5 minutes and tells you whether you have a problem. It does not tell you what to do about it.
Fixing it starts with a question I ask every dealership I work with: What are you actually doing to stay top of mind with the people who will be ready in the next five years?
My free marketing checkup is where we answer it. The form takes about ten minutes, then we spend 45 minutes together going through what you wrote. I’ll show you where the holes are and what to put in them.
Because that is what you are actually building. Not a lead. A logo somebody recognizes out of context, in the wrong color, on a machine you don’t even sell.
Clark spent a hundred years on that, and it worked on a marketer who was lost on a dirt road and not thinking about forklifts at all.
Does this resonate with you? Run those two numbers and tell me your split. Send it to me, even if it’s ugly. Especially if it’s ugly.
And if you can identify the machine in the photo, please do. My best guess is a Michigan wheel loader, but I got lost twice in one afternoon, so my judgment is under review.
Stay Visible,
Julie
* Here is my math, so you can argue with it. 3,558 companies × 2 forklifts × $38,000 = $270.4 million. The 5/95 split comes from research by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, where this whole idea started. I applied it as a benchmark, not as something I measured in this territory.
I also lowballed on purpose. Two trucks per company is conservative, and you know it. The $38,000 is a new truck and nothing else, so no rental, no used, no parts, no service, no racking, no scrubbers. Add those back, and the number gets a lot less comfortable.