by GTRsuite is a tech company that helps manufacturers and retailers “capture customer intention” with store locator and lead generation technology on their website that direct customers shopping online to their nearest brick-and-mortar retailer.
The company created Coaster’s lead engine tool, and also provides works with Acme Furniture, Jerome’s, Crypton Fabric, Currey & Co., and Bailey’s Furniture, to name a few, and the results are staggering.
Acme launched GTRsuite on December 22, and already the tech has generated $1.4m in leads directly to their dealers.
“Seventy percent of shoppers start the customer journey online”, says Steve Baxter, co-founder and COO of GTRsuite. “And because people like like to touch the product, we also know that 87% of all consumer retail GDP is spent in a brick-and-mortar store. So what we’re about is this online to offline conversion and increasing the conversion ratio of shopper intent online and walking into a brick-and-mortar store.”
Baxter says that while store locators aren’t new, their technology is. People don’t search for stores, they search for what the store sells, which requires a different approach.
“From Google’s perspective, where your store comes up in a search from is going to be largely determined by how well you’re your content matches at a local level to that particular search,” he says. “Google best rewards a high-quality local search.
“And it’s because retailers are largely doing a very poor job of local search—and matching the content to that search—that Amazon and Wayfair have been such disrupters online when it comes to searching for furniture,” Baxter explains. “But retailers and manufacturers have everything they need to do what I call ‘disrupting the disrupters.’ Wayfair and Amazon don’t have brick-and-mortar stores, they don’t have local content. So we help retailers win this search war by getting hyperlocal with highly optimized content searches.”
When it comes to price, Baxter says that, though it depends on the complexity of the program the customer wants, it will cost the manufacturer anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 per annum. However, the ROI is usually realized in “less than a week,” according to Baxter.
For manufacturers with dealers, setting up the technology, doesn’t require a retailer to do a thing. “If you’re a retailer working with one of our manufacturers, you win automatically as a result of what we’re doing,” Baxter says.
The company also just finished creating its Lead Prediction Engine, which ethically captures information from customers who visit websites but don’t click the button saying they’re interested in an item. It uses geo-locating to capture their information—but not their name—based on the interaction with a product.
“The tech does two things,” Baxter explains. “First, if you already use GTRsuite, it overlays the national interest on top of all of your existing retailers. We summarize that by sales rep region or however you want it summarized. So basically, we can give a data report, to let’s say, a sales rep who’s covering South Florida. Now he can walk into any one of his dealers and say, ‘hey listen, you have not purchased any barstools from me but I know that there are 800 people within five miles of here who are looking for barstools right now. Get barstools in.'”
The second thing the prediction engine does is overlay that on top of every other furniture retailer in the country. Sales reps can knock on the door of all of the retailers that are not selling their stuff and show them what items local consumers in the area are interested in. This can be done by territory, by zip code, or across a region.
“And so, this is a great way I think for the sales reps and the manufacturers to go out there and attract more retailers and sell more product.”
