AFTERMARKET SALES AND SERVICES- STILL AN AFTERTHOUGHT?

From the time businesses began offering solutions rather than products, they have acknowledged the fact that selling spare parts and after-sales services might be a great source of profits. Even today, many businesses perceive aftermarket sales as an afterthought only. Why?

The prime reason being aftermarket services asks for proficiency beyond expectation. The manufacturers of original equipment often subject their customers to unnecessary delays when problems arise, and lots of OEMs outsource customer service. This translates to consumers being dissatisfied with the facility availed and investors being unable to exploit the market’s true potential. Only enterprises that provide sales and services efficiently and effectively, such as prosport, can truly benefit.

Focusing on after-sales services pays off in a number of ways. For example, it’s cheaper for businesses to extend sales of parts and service-related products than to seek out new customers. Now when brands such as prosport provide aftermarket support, they gain a unique insight into their customers’ choices that’s difficult for rivals to accumulate.

Aftermarket services business becoming indispensable for manufacturers

The share of returns on sale from new product sales for producers has been declining over the past decade. Revenue from new product sales is usually less than those on aftermarket services in international markets. 

Challenges Manufacturers face in delivering aftermarket services

Here are some general challenges manufacturers face in delivering aftermarket services efficiently:

1. Macro-economic forces

Developing an insight on the consumers’ purchase in response to COVID-19 and the resultant impact on aftermarket services seems improbable at this time, given the pandemic’s ever-evolving nature.

2. Ever-Increasing competition

The level of competition keeps growing in the industry as manufacturers or producers continue to operate in a sophisticated environment with multiple stakeholders, including suppliers, partners and others.

3. Talent shortage

Manufacturers are facing a grave shortage of talent with new skills. As technology keeps advancing overnight and equipment keeps gaining additional traits, the refurbish and repair procedure becomes more and more complicated.

4. Entry of New Competitors

As utility-based business models are strangers to many OEMs, they come with imperative complimentary risks. As a result, investors from unrelated industries are jumping to grab the opportunity and capitalise on the same. 

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5. Lack of a service-oriented culture

Lack of a concentrated service organisation and resistance to transformation prove to be pertinent issues affecting numerous manufacturers.

In Spite of all the challenges of aftermarket, this is the golden era of aftermarket sales and services. To thrive and prosper to the pinnacle, we’re told that every enterprise must and should extend its domain into a services business. Largely, executives promptly swear by the services-focused perception of the world, but in private, they confess to one troubling concern: Most of the companies either have no clue as to how to cater to the after-sales service needs effectively and efficiently or don’t care to provide them. The first-tier management across the globe perceives aftermarket sales as a mere afterthought.

On top of the challenges aforementioned, ignoring the promise after-sales services makes is unwise, at the least. Since the beginning of the 1990s, enterprises in the United States, Central Asia and Far-east Asian countries have ceased pushing commodities. They are delivering the value that the consumer gets when he uses that product. These countries shifted their course since claims crashed, challenges exploded, and returns on investment went down the drain. When businesses and enterprises started providing solutions in lieu of commodities, it became justifiable to sell supplementary parts and after-sales amenities: carrying out restoration, positioning improvisation, renovating apparatus, running regular checks and routine upkeep, facilitating practical support, deliberation, and instructing and setting-out finances can turn out to be a bumper source of earnings and income as well.