by One year ago, tech provider GTRSuite launched its Prediction Engine — a tool that geolocates online furniture shoppers so retailers and manufacturers can know where all of the searches appear and the SKU they’re interested in.
This enables manufacturers to target dealers that don’t sell their product, and in 2023 the company drove over $60 million in furniture sales as a direct result of the Prediction Engine.
However, co-founder Steve Baxter says in the last year the tool generated $4 billion in shopper intent. That means that those who were shopping online and looked at specific product could have spent up to $4 billion based on what they viewed.
“What we’ve figured out in this industry is that very few manufacturers make it easy to connect that shopper intention with the dealer, and we take a point of view that one of the main purposes of a manufacturer’s website should be to drive traffic directly to dealer leads.”
He says many of them are failing at this, and there are a few reasons why. First, many manufacturers have always seen their customers as the dealer, and they don’t necessarily think about the end-consumer or driving demand for their dealers.
“As we’ve talked to the sales reps’ manufacturers, we’ve found out that everybody needs to have a positive story,” Baxter says. “Whereas a lot of manufacturers will focus on getting more dealers, we’d like to say is it’s not necessarily about having more dealers — it’s about having better dealers, more floor space and making sure that your dealers have all the data they need to make the right decisions about what to order and stock. There’s an almost tragic lack of data when it comes to the discussions between dealers and manufacturers about precisely what they should be stocking and what they should be buying.”
GTRSuite aims to bring this data into the conversation so that the home furnishings industry can capitalize on this $4 billion opportunity.
To start, Baxter says the industry sees about a 3% conversion rate when it comes to leads. But more importantly, that means 97% of consumers aren’t filling out a lead form.
“We’ve looked at the conversion rate of those 3% of leads and we’re converting somewhere between 38% to 51% of those leads into actual purchases right at the dealer,” Baxter says. “Because the sales rep is getting that lead in real-time, it’s creating new conversations that had never happened before.”
However, a challenge occurred when GTRSuite looked into the dealers following up with these leads — only one in five retailers called the shopper back. Yet retailers were still closing around 40% of the sales, so what happened?
“Ninety-three percent of the time the shoppers were not buying from the dealer where they sent the lead,” Baxter explains. “Shoppers called other dealers who answered and bought from them. There are a large number of people who have a high intention of purchasing furniture. And it’s almost criminal that these dealers are getting these leads and not calling back. What we’re able to do with this data as we start to show this to our customers is that if they call back engaged within the first few hours, there was a 74% chance that they were going to solve that piece of furniture or talking continue the engagement because what we found from all of our data and this is talking to thousands of shoppers.”
That’s a big piece of the puzzle that GTRSuite has set out to solve, and the company isn’t slowing down anytime soon. This year it has ambitious goals to help even more members of the industry through tech that takes some of the guesswork out of tracking sales.
In addition, an update to the Prediction Engine is in the works, and it will help manufacturers see which dealers are inactive accounts, and which are doing well or poorly sales-wise.
“How does a sales rep know in his territory which of his dealers have got declining sales or which ones are inactive?” Baxter says. “The Prediction engine 2.0 will have all of the sales data in an easy-to-understand map so that when a sales rep wants to plan their day, all the data and information is in front of them.”
