In 2005 Medeco decided to pursue an new pilot program designed to be a pseudo franchise, where (although no ownership was involved) Medeco would help loyal locksmith upgrade their shops to become Medeco Security Centers.
Branding, Training & Business Development
The program was designed from scratch and included three main elements: Branding, Training and Business Development. A pilot group was selected and the program ran in its pilot phase for 16 months.
The Branding portion of the program consisted of a 12ft retail display featuring both residential and commercial Medeco products. This modular display was designed to be a visual focal point and a sales tool for dealers to help walk prospective customers through the Medeco product features. In addition to the display an allotment was set aside for dealers to do both external and some limited internal signage. These ranged from marquee signs, window signage and everything in between. Because the size and location of each MSC varied, we worked with them individually to come up with a branding strategy.
Owner Training was conducted in Salem Virginia at the start up and conclusion of the pilot program. Dealers were called on to form a communications team where ideas were shared among the group to help foster success. On site dealer trainign was also held for each dealers staff and focused on both sales and business issued facing dealers today.
The Business Development portion of the program consisted of a variety of marketing resources but focused primarily on cable advertising for the locksmiths geographic regions.
The program was accepted out of the pilot stage and is still going strong today.
ASSA ABLOY had already been successful running end user mobile showrooms and taking our product direct to the end users.
I was charged with working with sister company's to outfit a locksmith mobileshowroom. This vehicle would vist our 150 MSC dealers and those dealers would invite their customers to come and visit the showroom.
In 2015 we had generated a lot of deadbolt leads from our deadbolt product selector online. One of the many challenges was how to convert them into sales. Because of our loyalty to the locksmith channel we started sending and sorting based on proximaty about 50 leads a month to our group of 150 MSC dealers. Because of the small quantities, a large percentage were not being contacted and those that were were taking several days because of the cumbersome process.
In 2015 I was asked to find a solution. That solution looked like Amazon. After a cumbersome setup process we finally had some product online but because we were selling to amazon, it was up to them to keep inventory, which wasn't reliable. So while improved the process still required a lot of manual effort.
Finally we found a dealer in 2018 who had a system in place where he was stocking and selling on amazon. Due to his succes and commitment to follow up immediately with every lead we transfered that business to him.
A long time ago, we were approached about putting limited Medeco and more Arrow locks on Grainger. This was out of our experience as it required bar coding, marketing fee's to grainger and a generous return policy.
I took on the project with the help of an experienced sales agency and for the first time sold online outside of the work our distributors may have done selling to dealers.