Spring Training

Howdy manufacturers! Jon Hoch, Founder of Power Equipment Direct, with a special February, 2015 edition of our video series. And I'm excited for two reasons.

First, I'm excited about the 36 inches of snow that fell in Boston last week. If you sell snow blowers, or in some cases, generators - what a storm that was.

Second thing I'm excited about is that, after February comes what? March, and what happens in March? Yeah, that's right. Mower Madness starts in March, our second annual Mower Madness tournament. For those of you who aren't familiar with this, it's about determining what is the best lawn mower brand in the United States.

And for those of you who participated last year, if you want to find out how you did, just type in Mower Madness 2014 in MowersDirect.com, and you'll see the results of how you did last year. And we're looking to do the same thing.



And congratulations to Gravely, hats off to them for winning the tournament last year. And by winning, you get a couple different things. One is, you get obviously bragging rights, and you get some good props that you can have for your employees and your fans. But in addition to that, you can get a nice, beautiful plaque and a picture with yours truly as a consolation prize. Fun, isn't it exciting?



But no, we really seriously want you to get involved in this. We think it's a great opportunity to get your employees and your fans excited about your particular brands and really spread the word about it.

So with that being said, I'm going to show you something very shocking, and you can't see it yet because, you know, the lawyers here will probably kill me for distributing and telling you what our lawn mower traffic is for Mowers Direct. Here's our web traffic for Mowers Direct. I shouldn't be showing this to you, but here it is. It looks like this.



Oh, oh... yeah, let me guess, it peaks in May. Oh, shocking, right? So surprising, right? Here we are today - here's where it peaks. Kind of uneventful, isn't it? So let's try Pressure Washers Direct. Let's try it again, let's see what it looks like. And here it is today, and it peaks in June. Oh, okay, great.



I'm trying to make a point here. The point is that we are here today, and do you want to get your listings and your products up and running here after the customers have left the store, or do you want to get it done now?

And I guess that this is where my sense of urgency is, is that we need to get our listings cleaned up and our programs up and running. And I've got some tips for you on how to do that.

So first, you can put your new products online, and here's a Toro, and we put it available, and you guys are familiar with all of this stuff. But we have two other things you may not be familiar with.

If you have products available at other retailers that we cannot sell, we can still put them online, and we can drive them to other retailers and tell them that they're available, and we can make that happen.



In addition to that, we can also put products that are only available at dealers and we can drive them to the local dealers. So you type in your zip code, and it'll go to the Gravely dealer locator and the customer can find a local dealer in their area to buy this.



This is an ad by the way, right? And we can do these things, right? So it's not just about selling product, it's about driving customers to appropriate places to get this stuff.

So some other tips that we have on cleaning things up. So we put your products online, and sometimes we're not perfect, and a second set of eyes would always be helpful for us.

One tip that I have is, if you compare your products, you quickly see where there might be some gaps. And some things got filled in incorrectly, or some things weren't put in properly. So, no hard feelings, we occasionally make mistakes. And if you want to point out some of those for us, thank you very much for helping us and double checking this thing, okay?

Other things that we can do. So this is the real time report card of one manufacturer. I'm not going to tell you who they are, but uhm... Hmm, hmm. Do you think they're going to sell a lot this year on our sites. Probably not. We need to work on getting this cleaned up, okay?

So, how do we do that? We can write reviews, we can respond to reviews, we can request irrelevant reviews get taken off the website. So we need to be cleaning this stuff up before the customers arrive.

In addition to that, we are going to be introducing, coming next, a new series on Preferred Placement, and if you can't wait for the new series to come out, go to our video library in Preferred Placement. The videos are already there. It's actually really cool, good way to get visibility and exposure for your listings and everything else.

So, lastly, I just want to say this. I am so excited about Mower Madness. It is coming, our second annual. I hope you're equally excited as well. We're going to be doing the drawings in just a couple of weeks. We're going to be publishing it. And stay tuned for that video to come out, and you'll see exactly who you're playing against in round one. And I hope you enjoy it and I hope you participate in it. So, with that being said I hope you have a good day. Take care.