Why your best dealer is in the wrong district
Most small manufacturers build a dealer network by accident. Accident produces overlap, dead territory and a network nobody can grow.
Ask a small implement manufacturer how he appointed his dealers and the honest answer is usually: they turned up.
That is how almost every network in this trade gets built. Someone walked in, asked for stock, and became a dealer. Repeated over ten years, it produces a map with three dealers competing in one town, nobody at all in the district next door, and no way to add a fourth without upsetting the first three.
What accident costs you
Overlap. Two dealers in the same catchment do not double your sales. They compete on your price, and the margin they lose comes out of your brand before it comes out of theirs.
Dead territory. The districts with no dealer are not empty of demand. They are being served by a competitor who did think about the map.
No room to grow. Once a territory is informally claimed, appointing a second dealer there becomes a fight. Firms avoid the fight, and the network freezes at whatever shape it happened to reach.
What a designed network looks like
Start from where the machines are used, not from who asked. For a rotavator that means tractor population, cropping pattern and holding size — not a list of people who called you.
Then three rules, applied consistently:
- One dealer per defined catchment, with the catchment written down
- Spares availability inside a defined radius, because a machine down in season is a dealer you lose
- A review the dealer knows about in advance, on numbers you both agreed
None of this is complicated. It is simply decided in advance rather than inherited.
A network built by accident is the cheapest one to create and the most expensive one to own.