Your heavy equipment dealership relies on internal data to monitor key metrics, track trends over time, and establish benchmarks for various sales and rental activities. But running a successful dealership requires more than looking inward at your day-to-day operations.
Analyzing your market share is essential to understanding how your dealership stacks up to competitors and where you have opportunities to expand new business, increase upsells, and more.
Oftentimes, you can calculate your market share using metrics you already track on a regular basis, such as:
- Sales Volume
- Revenue
- Growth Rate
- Geographic Distribution
- Customer/Product Segmentation
While you might easily be able to pull the latest reports on these metrics within your business, you also need to see how those reports compare to other dealers in your area, of a similar size, and with the same original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partnerships.
Where Can You Find Relevant Market Data?
Market share data comes from various external sources, including:
- OEMs and affiliated third parties like, EDA, Randall Reilly, and Rouse that publish industry sales data
- Market research firms such as FactMR and TechNavio
- Trade associations like AED and CMAA that publish benchmarking reports and member surveys.
- Government organizations like ITA or the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that release economic data, industry statistics, trade data, spending reports, and employment figures annually.
- Financial entities through which publicly traded companies must disclose financial reports and SEC filings.
Use Cases for Third-Party Market Share Data
Before you can start acting on industry benchmarks and other market share data, you need a business intelligence (BI) platform that combines internal and external datapoints into a single source of truth – and makes it easy to organize and analyze various figures simultaneously.
Perhaps most obviously, you can use things like benchmark reports to track your dealership's performance against industry standards and peer organizations – both of which are crucial to staying competitive.
Beyond updating your internal goals and benchmarks, you might also choose to build detailed competitive analyses to answer questions like:
- How does our market share compare to our competitors?
- What are our weak spots and/or biggest opportunities in this specific market segment?
- How should we revise our marketing and sales strategies based on what’s happening in our industry?
With the right BI tools in place, you can also use market share data to evaluate the effectiveness of your ongoing campaigns and sales strategies and to plan for future initiatives like new product offers, adjustments to pricing, and expansion into new geographies.
In a similar vein, market share data is a valuable tool for informing your investments in things like technology upgrades, more inventory, or new employees. Understanding where other dealers are investing and which areas of the market are ripe for the taking helps ensure your resources are consistently going to the areas with the highest potential return.
How to Use Heatmaps for Market Share Data Visualization
Once you identify the key points of your dealership’s market share, like which counties have the greatest market share or which pieces of equipment sell best in certain regions, there are several ways to present your findings.
Heatmaps are a great option for showing the geographic distribution of your market share using color gradients on top of map illustrations. These maps offer a quick, easy-to-digest visualization of market trends and penetration. They also make it easy to see regional performance hotspots without getting lost in all the numbers as you dig through tons of data tables.
Whether you share heatmaps with the C-Suite, your sales team, or the entire company, these visualizations boost data-centric decision-making by simplifying complex analyses and cutting down on the time it takes to understand and act on the data within them.
Heatmaps can illustrate a wide variety of market share-related metrics. Here are a few ideas for how to use them at your equipment dealership:
- Performance Benchmarking: Create a visual comparison of regional sales data over time and learn how you can adjust your strategies based on market response.
- Optimizing Resource Allocation: Identify high-potential regions and/or product categories and distribute your sales and inventory resources accordingly.
Learn How to Build Heatmaps in TARGIT Decision Suite
Get more information on how to use heatmaps at your dealership and see an expert walkthrough of heatmap creation in TARGIT by watching our on-demand webinar, Creating Heatmaps With Market Share Data.
Follow along to learn how you can build custom heatmaps that measure market share, penetration, open opportunities, sales coverage, and more. Plus, see example use cases for interactive heatmaps and get insider tips on how to use market data to develop these powerful visualizations inside TARGIT's specialized BI solution for heavy equipment dealers.
