Selling Coimbatore pumps and motors: one pack for dealers, another for institutional buyers

A pump maker sends the same catalogue to a dealer in Dharmapuri and to a builder's engineer in Chennai. The dealer asks for the rate list. The engineer asks for test reports. Neither orders. A dealer and an institutional buyer are deciding different things, so give them different packs. The dealer pack carries the rate list, the stock position and how a warranty claim is handled. The institutional pack carries data sheets, certificates, test reports and references. Nothing from the first pack goes into the second.

What a dealer decides on

A pump dealer in Krishnagiri or Erode sells to farmers and plumbers who walk in with a problem: a borewell of a given depth and diameter, or a sump that needs filling. The dealer wants a model that can be picked from a chart and sold that afternoon.

The decision rests on margin, whether you have stock when the season starts, and what happens when a motor burns out in the middle of it. A farmer whose pump fails in the dry months goes to the dealer, not to you. If the motor has to go to Coimbatore and come back, the dealer will push the brand whose service point is closer.

What an institutional buyer decides on

An institutional buyer is not one person. It is an MEP consultant's engineer writing a specification, a plumbing contractor pricing it, and a purchase team at a builder, a hospital or a college checking documents. Pumps for apartment blocks, factory lines and campus water systems are bought this way.

They decide on three questions. Does your pump meet the duty point, the flow and head the system needs? Do you hold the certifications and test reports the specification names? And will someone attend a breakdown in their city? Many large projects also carry a list of approved makes. If you are not on it, the contractor cannot buy you, however good the price.

Certificates are issued per model. A test report for one motor rating may not cover the next size up, so list each certificate against the model codes it was issued for, with its date, and leave out a model whose paper you cannot find. What a given specification demands is for your certification body to confirm.

The two packs, item by item

The dealer pack

• Rate list with dealer price, retail price and the season's scheme, dated and marked with the dealer's name.
• Stock position by model, and how many days dispatch from Coimbatore takes to the dealer's town.
• A selection chart a farmer can follow: borewell diameter, depth and power supply to model.
• One page on warranty claims: what the farmer brings, what the dealer checks, and where the motor goes for repair.
• Spare parts list with part numbers.
• Counter material in the language the dealer's customers read, Tamil, Kannada or Telugu.

The institutional pack

• Data sheets and performance curves for the models that fit their duty, not the whole catalogue.
• Current copies of the certificates and test reports you hold.
• Three references with installations like theirs, each with a person who has agreed to take a call.
• Company documents for vendor registration: GST, Udyam registration, bank details on letterhead.
• The name of the person who attends a breakdown in their city. Say how far away that person is.

Never put the dealer rate list, dealer margins or scheme details in the institutional pack. Our note on getting on a company's approved vendor list covers the document folder in more depth.

For example: one catalogue, two problems

For example, picture a Coimbatore maker of openwell submersibles, monoblocks and booster pumps. Most of its volume goes through dealers in the Kongu belt and north Tamil Nadu. It started quoting apartment builders in Chennai and Bengaluru.

It sent one long PDF to everyone. The dealer rate list sat on page 30. A Chennai builder's engineer forwarded the PDF to the builder's purchase team, who used the dealer price to push the project quote below it. The same month, a Hosur dealer learned that the factory had quoted a builder in the dealer's own town directly. The dealer stopped pushing the brand that season.

Two problems came from one file, and the answer was two packs and one rule. The institutional pack went to builders, with no rates in it; project quotes were made separately, on letterhead, for that project. The rule decided who handles a project in a dealer's town: the factory quotes, the dealer is named for installation and service and is paid for that work. The cost was real: the factory, say about 3% of project value in this invented case, gave up some margin on project quotes to pay dealers for installation and service, and one of the three Kongu dealers still grumbled that a fee was less than a sale. The Hosur dealer started stocking the brand again the following season. All of this is an invented case; the figures belong to your own business.

Who handles an institutional enquiry in a dealer's town?

Write the rule down before the next enquiry arrives:

1. Small orders from a builder or a contractor in a dealer's area go through that dealer at the dealer price.
2. Larger projects are quoted by the factory, with the dealer named for installation and service and paid for it.
3. Any enquiry from an area with no dealer goes to the factory, and the salesperson notes the town as a possible dealer location.

Decide where "small" ends in your own business, by order value or by number of pumps, and tell every dealer the same line.

There is one case where you should decline the institutional order. If you have nobody who can attend a breakdown in the buyer's city, a hospital or a high-rise whose water stops will remember your name for the wrong reason. Build the service cover first, then chase that city.

Mark every catalogue page D or I

Take your current catalogue tonight and mark each page D for dealer, I for institutional, or both. Any page with a dealer price on it is D, whatever else it carries. The D pages are the first thing to pull from anything a builder has already received. Then send each appointed dealer a fresh, dated rate list and ask for the old one to be destroyed, which is the quickest way to stop an old price circulating.

When the two packs need writing and designing, that is sales collateral development, and the wider picture for plants like yours is under manufacturing. If you want both packs and the territory rule in writing, tell us what you need.