Mike Marusic
Last year around this time Sharp introduced its Promotion Plus Pricing, a new pricing program that did away with the special monthly incentives so common to the industry by giving that pricing to their dealers every single day.
If you want to shake up your dealer channel, just change the status quo. After a rocky start and trying to convince dealers that this was a better way than ‘the deal of the day’ approach that they were used to, the program has been a boon to Sharp and its dealers. According to Mike Marusic, senior vice president of Sharp’s Marketing & Business Solutions Group, the numbers point to a program that’s been a raging success.
Based on its six-month fiscal, year over year, Sharp-only dealers have seen their business up by 136 percent year over year thanks to Promotion Plus Pricing. “I don’t think there’s any other channel in the industry up 136 percent year over year,” states Marusic.
Probably not.
“That’s tens of millions of dollars in additional sales for us,” he adds.
Rank this too as a notable achievement for Sharp who spent a good portion of the past year dispelling rumors about its future because of its parent company’s financial troubles—rumors that competitors haven’t been shy about exploiting.
Is he surprised that Sharp-only dealers are up 136 percent in this crazy business climate. “I am,” he says. “We knew it was the right thing, but it was amazing the challenges they faced because they had a lot of hits against them for being Sharp only.”
By providing stable pricing, dealers are now able to sell their customers products at the best possible price every single day.
A year later the Promotion Plus Pricing program remains the same as when it was initially introduced on Oct. 1, 2012. “The key to the whole program is its consistency,” says Marusic.
He acknowledges that this still a little more of a challenge whenever Sharp introduces a new model because the pricing for the older models was based on the best net pricing provided to dealers under the deal of the day system, which was then converted to their everyday pricing. The new models don’t have that history. As a result Sharp tries to get as aggressive as possible with the pricing for new introductions.
“That’s a little hard psychologically because you have to be aggressive before you perceive the need,” says Marusic.
Still, so far so good with the pricing on the new models.
As for Sharp’s dual-line dealers, their Sharp business is up 16 percent year over year.
Last year we spoke with a couple of Sharp dealers who were lukewarm about the Promotion Plus Pricing. Part of that uncertainty was because these dealers were used to getting great pricing deals and the concern was that those deals would disappear. Turns out those concerns were unwarranted. Of those two dealers, the least successful has found his Sharp numbers up 180 percent year over year. One of those dealers, Chip Miceli, president of DPOE in Elk Grove, IL, now notes, “The program worked great for us; I was able to cut my inventory down, which give me a lot more working capital. I never liked ordering at the end of the year or quarter big buy deals.”
With the deal of the day supplanted by Promotion Plus Pricing Sharp has seen a steady line of sales across the board without the peaks and valleys typically associated with those deals of the day.
Going into its final month of their fiscal year (September), Sharp was well ahead of plan and well ahead of profit goals. “The reason is the last five of the past six months in our half year our dealers have been buying ahead of last year’s rate without the deals,” confirms Marusic.
