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Increase Sales with Facility Tours

Now in its second year, our Tour Support Program has become a highly effective sales tool. We already have six tours booked in the first few months of 2017.

A facility tour at ROUSH CleanTech headquarters in Livonia, Michigan, is a great resource to bring customers through or to educate your employees. Depending on your goals, we can customize the tour’s content to focus on propane, CNG or gasoline school bus sales, technical service or general education.

We want to provide an equal opportunity for all of the dealers, regardless of location, to visit our factory. To help cover the cost of this tour, we’ll pay a portion of your and your customer’s expenses based on where you’re coming from. Check out the map online here to determine how much we will cover, per person, for visits from your state.

Our Q1 calendar is starting to fill up! The following weeks are still available for tours:

• Week of February 13
• Week of March 13
• Week of March 20
• Week of March 27

The typical tour itinerary includes:

• Afternoon arrival of dealer personnel and customers.
• Dinner hosted by ROUSH CleanTech and Blue Bird.
• Morning tour of the ROUSH CleanTech manufacturing facility, product overview and service presentations.
• Break for lunch provided by ROUSH CleanTech and Blue Bird.
• Afternoon demonstration of propane autogas fueling, tour of ROUSH Performance, and a tour of the ROUSH Automotive Collection museum, featuring Jack Roush’s personal collection of cars.
• Afternoon departure.

In order to qualify for the reimbursement program, the following criteria must be met:

• Customer attendees must be current or prospective customers who plan to purchase in the next 12 months.
• Maximum group size is 30 people.
• Background information, including attendees’ names, titles, district and contact information, must be provided to ROUSH CleanTech in advance of the tour.
• At least one dealer representative is required to attend.

Whether you’ve taken this tour before with your staff or a customer, or this is your first time, you’re all sure to learn something new, and, more importantly, to close sales. To schedule a tour through our Tour Support Program, call us at 800.59.ROUSH or contact your ROUSH CleanTech rep today.

Important Update: VW Funding Efforts

In our last issue of the Alt Fuels Report and at the national dealer meeting, we mapped out a strategy to secure VW funding for alt fuel school buses. So far, our outreach efforts have yielded the following results:

About 50 percent of Blue Bird dealers have contacted us and are working on their letters. We need to get that number higher. Please reach out to Chelsea Uphaus if you have any questions on completing the template letters. You can find them here.

Seven meetings have been scheduled with potential beneficiaries to discuss the inclusion of school bus replacement funds in their states’ program.

We’ve received four responses from governor’s offices acknowledging they have received our letter and will consider school buses in their state’s programs. Only 46 more to go!

We encourage all dealers to actively be working with school districts, sending in their letters to beneficiaries, and completing the Excel spreadsheet template that Blue Bird sent in a recent dealer memo. Our goal is that by the end of this month (that’s 11 more days), all dealers have sent their beneficiary letters and also have spoken to five school districts to get each of them to submit a letter.

If you have any questions, please contact Chelsea Uphaus at Chelsea.uphaus@roush.com.

Holland Bus Uses Public Relations to Increase Sales

Dealer: Holland Bus Sales
Contact: Chuck Burch
School District: Waterford School District, Michigan

This month, Waterford School District (WSD) deployed 10 new Blue Bird Vision Propane buses into its fleet. Holland Bus Sales’ Chuck Burch knew the district could get positive attention about the buses — they are the first in the county to switch from diesel buses to propane models. Chuck wanted to show that his school district customer was being smart with its money and forward thinking for the community.

ROUSH CleanTech and Holland Bus Sales worked together on a press release and event last year for another local customer in Detroit. Holland had a lot of success from that public relations effort, and they knew that we could drum up some more attention for this district, too.

Holland and ROUSH CleanTech sent a questionnaire to WSD to help the school district think through the story to tell about its bus purchase. For this particular customer, the new superintendent had a previous positive experience with propane buses, so it was an easy choice. We asked them to take some high-resolution photos, too, that we would make available to reporters.

We used the information from WSD and other newsworthy data on propane school buses to draft a press release. Timing it around the delivery of the new buses, we distributed the press release to media outlets in the area and to school bus trade publications. We then followed up with outreach via email and phone calls to secure media placements.

Local media coverage of new propane deployments gives school districts an opportunity to tell their story, while offering Blue Bird dealers the chance to promote alt fuels, get more attention from other districts in their market, keep Blue Bird’s name in the news, and potentially grow sales.

Are you interested in promoting the propane buses sold to one of your customers? Email Brian Carney at brian.carney@roush.com to learn more about this opportunity.

Read the full press release here.

Here are some examples of the media coverage:

• BP News
• School Bus Fleet
• Street Insider

Dealer Spotlight: Blue Bird Sales of Pittsburgh

Dealer: Blue Bird Sales of Pittsburgh
Interviewee: Mark Schmitt
Title: President / CEO
Why do you promote propane to your customers?

The propane program with Blue Bird, ROUSH CleanTech and Ford is the best relationship I’ve ever experienced in my entire 45 years. That’s enough in itself to get on board.

Propane is good for America. It’s an affordable fuel. And the propane bus itself is simple — not complicated like a diesel bus. We use the total cost of ownership information available to show customers the savings. Also, propane fueling is easy to put on site and cheaper than putting above- or below-ground diesel or gas tanks at your facility.

What have you done that’s made you so successful with propane?

We give customers a hands-on experience through bus demos and facility tours.

We always have demos on site of every type of bus we sell. Without demos, I don’t know how people can be in the business.

For our tours, we trained our sales staff and technicians on propane and they’re all-in. We’re building a new facility with a 30,000-gallon commercial (public) fueling station on the property. This is the first dedicated school bus facility in the state of West Virginia!

Do you have any advice for dealers looking to sell more propane?

Plant propane buses like seeds, and then they grow. You don’t have to go in and convert an entire fleet. Start with one or two or five buses and then see how it goes. Soon, the district will have a majority of propane buses.

The success of the product comes with service after the sale. Get your technicians up to speed and certified through ROUSH CleanTech and Ford. ROUSH CleanTech is very serious about getting service issues resolved quickly. We don’t hear “we’re working on it” from them. ROUSH CleanTech has assembled a great team. They’re for real.

Training is also important. Train your sales reps and technicians on the product. That, along with the support from the manufacturing side, makes it successful.

Three Ways We Are Strengthening Our Customer Support

At the Blue Bird dealer meeting, we showed the results of the survey where we asked, you, the dealers, to provide honest feedback about how easy it is to do business with us. Although we scored well in some areas, we got some very specific feedback about how to improve.

So, it’s time to change. We’re going to focus on three key areas:

1. Our processes
2. Our people
3. Our technology

From a process standpoint, we are adjusting how we handle all incoming inquiries with our new Customer Support group. We will have traceability and accountability internally to ensure every call is answered or returned in a timely fashion.

Our people are equally important, so we are investing in customer service training for our staff, improving coverage on the phones with a new staffing strategy, and hiring new people to handle the increased workload.

We will make all this happen through the use of technology, and plan to unveil some exciting new developments throughout 2017. We are building on a solid foundation with our Service Cloud and phone systems, which will help us measure and report where the improvements are happening or need to happen faster.

ROUSH CleanTech as an organization is committed to world-class customer service. We know that we have a long way to go to get there, but the process, people and technology changes we are implementing will get us to that point.

If you have feedback on how we’re doing or where we can improve, please call us at 800.59.ROUSH.