Simplify Your Business Operations With The Sandhills Cloud

Sandhills has spent decades developing tools and resources to connect buyers and sellers in the agriculture, construction, trucking, and aviation industries, as well as simplifying processes that occur before, during, and after sales. All those tools are conveniently located in one hub, the Sandhills Cloud, a suite of apps available anytime, anywhere. These apps cover everything from managing inventory to sales platforms for marketing assets to financing and shipping to complete the sale.

Start With Inventory

Inventory Management is the gateway to an array of actions with other apps in the Sandhills Cloud. Once you add an asset to your inventory, you can generate quotes, list the asset for sale or rent, document an inspection, perform real-time asset valuations, and much more, all with no redundant data entry.

Simplify Your Trade-Ins

The Trade In app enables sales reps in the field to communicate with decision-makers in the office in an organized and streamlined fashion. The unified, step-by-step process allows a rep to bundle photos, videos, and crucial specifications in a single submission rather than piecemeal via text or email.

The rep’s manager can then use FleetEvaluator to determine a value for the rep to share with the customer. If the customer accepts the deal, the asset is added to the dealership’s inventory for immediate marketing, and the rep may then perform an optional inspection. If the customer doesn’t accept the deal, the asset moves to a Customer Inventory list for potential brokerage and follow-up opportunities later on.

Dealers using the Trade In process can also view historical details about potential trades, such as an asset’s hours, for-sale prices, and locations on previous dates.

Get Historical Asset Records

With the Historical Equipment Search app, Fast Track Iron users can simply enter a serial number or vehicle identification number (VIN), and if the number is valid, view a historical records table. Each set of records may include the manufacturer, model, year, location, condition, hours or mileage, event type (such as a note that the asset was put up for sale), and a price.

Know Your Markets

To help sellers stay on top of the latest trends in markets for trucks, trailers, farm machinery, construction equipment, aircraft, and more, Sandhills offers Monthly Market Reports. The reports use a massive store of new and historical equipment and sales data to predict where the markets are heading.

MarketTrends is another tool available to dealers to gauge the current market. MarketTrends displays current for-sale prices and auction results for specific makes and models of trucks and equipment on an interactive graph to help dealers make decisions about their inventory.

Get Accurate Asset Valuations

The best place to start any sale is knowing the worth of your assets. From there, you can determine the best sales avenue, asking price, and more. The Value Insight Portal (VIP) is the fast, easy way to get accurate, real-time values for heavy equipment, trucks, and trailers.

Monitor Your Fleet & More

TelematicsPlus offers a user-friendly management dashboard to track assets and entire fleets. The timesaving app consolidates connected fleet assets from a mix of brands and telematics providers in one portal. Fleet managers can stay informed about the health and location of individual pieces of equipment and entire fleets, including real-time market and auction values, comparisons to similar equipment on the market, diagnostics, active and idle hours, and more. That information can help determine the best times to acquire and dispose of heavy machinery, trucks, and trailers, and offers built-in tools to create fleets, geofences, and auction packages.

Manage Auctions Better

The Auction Management app is a centralized hub for all the tasks needed to run auctions, whether online with AuctionTime or in person with Equipmentfacts. Import inventory, automate invoices, categorize accurately, and more.

Track Auction ROI

Bidder Maps, available for AuctionTime and Equipmentfacts auctions, offer a visual breakdown of bidder activity. Auctioneers can quickly see the geographic location of bidders on auction assets. They can also zoom in or out on the map and customize the map by date range, consignment package, equipment category, and other parameters.

Red pins indicate winning bidders, and when clicked, display the bidder’s high bid, whether it was a first-time bidder, and a link to the sold asset. Auctioneers can also filter the map by bidder type, including all bidders, winning bidders, or first-time bidders, to view only results for those categories.

Finalize The Sale

Financing can often be the biggest obstacle to finalizing a sale. CurrencyFinance can help your buyers find funding, regardless of their credit history. The Currency Dealer Portal enables dealers to start financing applications on behalf of their customers.

Once an asset is purchased, the buyer needs to transport it to its new location. FR8Star has a vetted network of experienced heavy-haul shippers to move trucks, trailers, and heavy equipment.

Measure ROI

Dealers invest a lot in advertising assets for sale or rent, so it is crucial that money is generating results to justify the expense. CallStats and WebStats provide dealers with the data they need to evaluate ad campaigns. CallStats tracks each call from your advertising through a unique phone number in your ads. CallStats then forwards callers to your actual phone number and gathers information about each call. You can choose whether your CallStats number is a toll-free one or a local number with your area code.

Data and demographics are presented in colorful bar graphs and pie charts to help dealers spot trends and changes in call volume, caller location, peak times, and more. Changing the date range enables dealers to track changes after a new ad size, use of priority pages, or addition of new regions to gauge effectiveness.

Measure Online Engagement

The WebStats app measures the online traffic your listings receive on Sandhills marketplaces. It reports your advertising stats in colorful, easy-to-read charts as well as in hard numbers of views, clicks, and buyer attempts to contact you.

Listing Impressions tally the number of times one of your listings appears in a buyer’s search results on any Sandhills marketplace. Detail Page Views counts the number of times someone clicked a listing to view additional asset details. Quick Find Views indicate the number of times a magazine reader typed in a listing’s Quick Find code to view an asset online. Clicks To Call and Text count how many online buyers tap the phone number in one of your listings to call or text you.

If you’re a dealer with a Sandhills-hosted website, you can use Premium WebStats to measure and analyze the behavior and demographics of visitors accessing your website and equipment listings.

More In Store

To view the full lineup of available apps, check out the Store app in the Sandhills Cloud. Dealers can find everything they need to streamline their operations at every step. Contact your Sandhills rep for assistance or more information on how to maximize the benefits of the Sandhills Cloud.

A version of this article first appeared in Sandhills Magazine. You can find current and back issues in the Sandhills Magazine Archive.