The spare you don't stock is the dealer you lose
A machine down in season is not a service problem. It is a distribution problem, and it costs the dealer, not you — which is exactly why it costs you.
A farmer’s rotavator stops mid-season. He goes to the dealer. The dealer does not have the part, and neither do you — it is a four-day wait.
Nothing in that sequence happened to you. All of it happened to the dealer, in front of a customer he will see again at the mandi, in a district where everybody knows everybody.
That is why spares decide dealer loyalty more reliably than margin does.
The asymmetry nobody prices
A spare part is a small, unglamorous line of working capital. The cost of not having it is not small: it is the dealer’s reputation, spent on your behalf, at the worst possible moment of the year.
Dealers understand this asymmetry perfectly, which is why an experienced one asks about spares before he asks about margin. A manufacturer who leads with discount and cannot answer the spares question is telling him something he already knows how to interpret.
What a workable spares policy looks like
Stock the wear items, not the catalogue. For most tractor-drawn implements a small number of parts account for nearly all in-season demand — blades and bolts, bearings and seals, the PTO shaft, the parts that fail because they are meant to wear. The rest can wait.
Put them where the machines are, not in your own store. Spares in your shed are inventory. Spares at the dealer are availability.
Define a radius and a response time, and tell the dealer what it is. An honest “48 hours” he can plan around beats an optimistic “immediately” that fails once.
Charge properly for them. Spares are not a loss leader and should not be priced as an apology. A dealer who makes a fair margin on parts has a reason to hold them.
The first machine is sold by the specification. The second is sold by what happened when the first one broke.
Why this is a distribution decision, not a service one
Firms file spares under after-sales, which makes it somebody’s afterthought. It belongs with the dealer map — see designing a dealer network — because the sensible unit of planning is the same in both cases: a catchment you can actually serve.
Expanding into a state where you cannot get a blade to a dealer inside a week is not expansion. It is a slower way of losing the state.