Find customers due for a new machine, using just QuickBooks

Why this works

Machines wear out on a clock. A pressure washer, a mower, a compressor that went out the door ten years ago is due, or close to it. The customer knows the machine is tired. What decides who gets the sale is who calls first, and most of the time nobody calls, because nobody can see the list. It's split between QuickBooks, an old contact database, and paper.

One dealer let us pull this list from their records: about 1,900 customers holding a ten-year-old machine, nobody had called them in months. You don't need us to get a rough version of yours. You need 30 minutes.

The 30-minute method

QuickBooks Desktop shown; Online works the same, the reports just have slightly different names.

1. Pull machine sales older than ten years. Run Sales by Item Detail. Filter to your machine items, set the dates from your earliest records through ten years ago, export to Excel. If your machines were never item-coded, filter by amount instead (see the questions below).

2. Boil it down to customers. Keep four columns: customer, item, sale date, amount. Use Remove Duplicates on the customer column. What's left is every customer who ever bought an old machine from you.

3. Cross off anyone you've seen lately. Same report, last two years, all sales this time. Anyone on both lists is already coming in for parts or service. Delete them. You're hunting the quiet ones.

4. Sort what's left by money. Biggest original sale first. Add phone numbers from your customer export. This is the call list, and if your shop has been around twenty years it is longer than you think.

5. Keep score. Two more columns: who called, what happened. Date every touch. A list nobody writes on is dead in a month.

What this method misses

Honesty section. The spreadsheet version is real money, and it has real holes:

It ages from day one. Next month's due customers aren't on it, and nothing updates it when a rep makes a call.
It can't see machines you didn't sell. Serial numbers, trade-ins, and machines bought from the dealer you replaced aren't in your sales history.
Service history lives somewhere else. A machine that's been in your shop three times this year is telling you something no sales report shows.
It's not in anyone's pocket. The list helps the rep who has it open. It does nothing for the rep driving past a quiet customer right now.

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Questions dealers ask.

My machine sales aren't separate items in QuickBooks. Now what?

Filter by amount instead. Pull all invoice lines over a cutoff that only machines clear at your shop, say $3,000. You'll catch a few big parts orders by mistake, but you can spot those by eye faster than you can re-code ten years of items.

Most of my history is in an old ACT database, not QuickBooks.

ACT can export contacts and notes to CSV, but stitching that to your sales history is the painful part, and it's the part we do when we set a dealer up. If you'd rather not spend the weekend on it, send us five or ten customers and book the fifteen minutes; we'll show you what the stitched-together version looks like.

How long does this list stay good?

It starts going stale the day you make it. Machines keep aging, customers buy elsewhere, reps make calls that never get written down. That's not a reason to skip the exercise. It's a reason to date every touch and redo the pull every quarter, or use something that keeps the list alive on its own.

Do I need Bucket to do this?

No. The method above works with QuickBooks and Excel, and the money you find is yours either way. Bucket's job is doing this continuously: every machine tied to its owner, ages tracked, the call list on a map on your reps' phones, updated as they work it.

Skip the spreadsheet next time.

Bucket does this continuously: every machine tied to its owner, ages tracked, and the call list on a map on your reps' phones. Send five or ten customers when you book, even straight off that spreadsheet, and they'll be on the map by machine age when the fifteen minutes starts.

Book a 15-minute demo

Find who's due for a new machine, using just QuickBooks.

Why this works

The 30-minute method

What this method misses

Questions dealers ask.

Skip the spreadsheet next time.