There has been much talk this past year about the decline of rental rates. Many rental industry people put the blame on the front-line sales people. Owners of rental companies will swear they want their sales staff to go out to the job sites and sell features and service rather than discount.
There is one inherent problem with this argument, one that has the outside sales staff caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. And that's that many companies don't have the features and the service to back them up.
Ideally, the sales person should be able to promise the customer that if his company says it will have the piece of equipment on the job site at 6 the next morning, it will deliver. The well-trained salesman wants to promise well-maintained equipment that won't break down on the job. He wants to be able to say “Sure, Brand X is giving you a 10 percent discount, but we have fewer breakdowns and we do oil analysis every so many hours, and in the unlikely event of a breakdown, we'll have a replacement machine on the job within an hour.”
But some can't say it because it isn't true. All too often, the company can't back up the promises of service the conscientious sales person needs to be able to offer. He can't get the equipment repaired as quickly as the customer has every right to demand and expect. He can't get the attention of his company's service manager or the company doesn't have the quality service personnel it needs. Or it doesn't have the varied inventory the company requires, or it's too far away at a different location and the company's system isn't set up to get a replacement quick enough for the customer to avoid huge capital losses. Or if the customer needs a particular machine that the rental company doesn't have, the company isn't willing to do whatever it takes to get the customer what he needs, either by finding it at a different branch or buying it or re-renting it.
So the salesman is falling off a branch and there's no safety net. He's promising what the contractor or industrial customer needs to be able to compete in his business, but he lacks the support. So he can't promise the best service, he can only compete with the tools he has — discounts. That rental company can't keep rates up because it doesn't have the quality control and service support infrastructure to offer the customer exemplary service and so the sales professional can't offer what he can't deliver. If we want our sales people to do a professional job, we have to back it up with professional action.
It's a vicious circle, because when rates are low, the rental company can't afford the kind of support contractor customers need. And then, for all our talk about how rentals will save the contractor money, without top performance, the contractor will find that rental only causes problems rather than provides solutions.
